It's Deja Vu All Over Again!

For the first time in six weeks, I woke up this morning with no place to go. My freelance gig at WBAL ended yesterday, and thanks to that crazy 3 am - 11 am schedule, I found myself up by 5 this morning, staring at the clock...

So I went downstairs and made a pot of coffee... went out to the driveway, picked up the morning paper... poured myself a cup, and started scanning the Washington Post in search of stories that we can advance today.

But wait a minute... There is no "we"... That would require me to be A) - working and B) - working with someone else... two conditions that do not apply here.

After I was let go at WMAL six months ago (SIX MONTHS!), it took me weeks to get over the fact that my job had been cut after 25 years. Out of habit, I was still coming up with material that someone could spin into gold on the air, and in fact, I fed probably a couple of dozen stories to my former colleague Bill Thompson just as a creative fix.

Now, after having a job to do and newscasts to write for six weeks at WBAL, I find myself in the exact same position... In fact, I didn't even wait 24 hours after leaving there before pestering my friends in Baltimore. When I found a story on Drudge last night that said Michael Phelps would be hosting Saturday Night Live, I called WBAL and let them know about it... Old habits truly do die hard!

Hopefully, my withdrawal this time around will be brief. I start training next week for another freelance gig, and hopefully, this one will keep me occupied for a while!

Before I go, I want to thank the nice folks at WBAL for having me in their newsroom over the past month and a half. They made me feel very much at home, and my time there gave me a much-needed reassurance that my news skills did not fade away as I've toiled on the Beach. It is a cold, cold world out here in the land of the underemployed, and it is nice to know there are places I can stop in to warm myself from time to time!

THIS JUST IN! - Yesterday's News!

Happy weekend, folks - Yes, even those of us in the world of the unemployed still enjoy weekends... That's because the wife and kids are around to help pass the time. I spent some of my time this morning reading the Sunday Washington Post magazine, and the wonderful article that lists 209 once-commonplace things that have become obsolete. Here's a choice example of something that has gone by the wayside, thanks, in this case, to the internet -

Doing Nothing at the Office
b. 1853 -- d. mid-1990s

The 20th century's best minds might have brought us many wonders fantastic (Decaf soy lattes! Shoulder-fired missiles! Plastic!), but what is truly stunning is the number of office hours Americans clocked during those same years doing . . . nothing much. Taking a cigarette break could sometimes nudge the minute hand a little. The water cooler was also created for this purpose. And paper clips. But in those many empty moments between tasks, much time was spent staring into space.

"When I started in the early '80s, there were word-processing centers," recalls attorney Howard Gutman, a partner at Williams & Connolly. "A 120-page brief could take two hours, and one mistake and you'd have to do it over again. Printing places would vie for business by having beds and food. If you were a young lawyer, sitting and waiting there really was your job."

Idle time's death knell was the Internet, which created a way to fill every moment while giving the appearance of productivity. The joys of making wastebasket two-pointers and using Scotch tape to extract nasal blackheads pale when compared with the minute-hand-massaging possibilities of Craigslist and YouTube.

According to Nielsen ratings, the average American visits more than 2,000 Web pages a month while on the clock; surveys by Vault.com suggest that close to 90 percent of workers spend part of their day doing Internet browsing that's unrelated to work.

This last factoid, of course, means that most of you are reading this at work... on the internet... the place where many more of you are now getting most, if not all of your news.... the place where advertisers are spending more and more of their dollars, at the expense of radio. Which explains all too well why radio news has joined the list of the obsolescent! Hmmm...