It’s getting close to a late night here. I have no plans on staying up late, but with anything and everything lately, I probably will.
The past week has been kind of crazy. I turned 31 yesterday and didn’t really have a party or anything. It wasn’t the greatest of birthdays. Since my vacation (set for THIS WEEK) was indefinitely postponed, my mom stayed away on her vacation another day so I was home alone with my dad. It could have turned into the birthday from hell but a couple of phone calls from friends and blowing some money at Walmart made the day feel a little better than it could have been.
Today was kind of cool. Laura Burstein returned to fill in for an hour of chat. The past week has not been the same without her and I’ve actually changed my hours at work to take advantage of the now the huge hole in my afternoons. No offense to anyone, but I don’t like how they handled this situation and I’m not supporting them right now until they start to treat their people better. You just don’t yank two people that the viewers have grown to know and care about out of roles they’re good at and replace them with … well … they didn’t really replace them.
Instead of replacing the afternoon team, the chat host now doubles as the netcam person. As dumb as this sounds, it’s true. The chat host — the person we’re all enticed to come and chat with — spends half of his or her time getting up to go answer the phone in another chair or to make way for an anchor because someone in management seems to have it in their brains that the shot from the chat desk looks great with an anchor there instead of a chat host. DOH.
IMODO it’s nuts to have the chat host get up in the middle of the conversation because the anchor is going to sit at the chat bar. That’s something that makes little to no sense to me and, frankly, as someone with several years of chat hosting experience, it would tick me off to have to get up every 15 minutes because someone has to do segments from my seat. In the chat itself, it’s disjointing. They put so much time and effort into getting us into chat only to have it flat on it’s face because any sort of moderated conversation goes out the window when they force the chat host out of her or his chair every five minutes.
Rants aside, it was great to see Laura in chat again and good to see that maybe someone is coming to their senses. If you’d like to see her or Heather in chat more often — or gosh darn it — on the air again, let them know at feedback@techtv.com.
In other news, it was a surprise tonight as Leo honored this site by using my Bill Gates as Mr. Burns at the start of the newly redesigned screen savers show tonight. I’m glad someone up there likes the site. As far as the show goes, the new set was disjointed as heck and it seemed to me like the same folks who decided to screwed up chat are decided to screw up the set but hey, that’s a rant for another time …
I’m off to bed.
— k9
PS To that friend in need, we’re not ALL that way. You just have to sort the mice from the men.