You ask, we deliver.

By Mark Mignini

Sometimes when the work day begins one never knows what twists and turns will come your way.  Case in point – July 8^th, 2010.  The day started out well enough.  I chatted up with the cute waitress while getting my morning coffee.  The commute on the Pike was a piece of cake.  Logged on to my computer, noticed that my fantasy baseball team did well the night before, was making plans to play poker in the evening.  My boss checked in and asked what was on the books for today and I said looks like a relatively calm day.  BIG MISTAKE!!.

Fast forward to 1pm.  I get a call from a client and they ask, how long will it take you to get to Greenwich, CT for an HD feed.  Since I am from CT, this was an easy question – 3.5 – 4 hours depending on traffic.  Client says “good, we need you there for 4pm”.  I make a quick call to Josh and get him heading to Greenwich to take part in the Lebron James “Decision Day” festivities.  Nice snag on our part and we get to be part of a momentous sports day.

Noon time rolls around and I get a crew request for a shoot on the Cape.  Client says “tell the crew to get there as fast as you can, ideally we need the footage by 5pm”.  As I scramble to put together a crew, I talk to the Producer and explain that it is an hour and a half to the Cape and during the summer it can be even longer.  We can do the shoot but traffic will most likely prohibit us from making the deadline.  The Producer was fine with that and everything was shot and fed to the client by 7:30pm.  Obviously this was later than she wanted but in the end she was happy with our efforts.

So far so good…one truck job and one crew job.  Turns out to be a pretty good day.  Catch up on some emails, check on the Bean Machine as she is coming up for a weekend event in Boston.  All is good.

2pm – “We need a truck and crew on the North Shore for 5pm” echoes another client.  The truck was the easy part.  I called Jimmy told him where and when to be there and he was good to go.  The crew part was a bit tricky.  Our in house crew was working on a VL Creative project and began to call some trusted and respected freelancers.  Call after call produced the same dreaded and feared response – “sorry already working”.  I eventually had a camera guy for the job but I was still searching for an audio tech.  I went through my whole list.  Nobody was available and this wasn’t looking good and I was about to enter panic mode.  Somehow the stars aligned right and the studio shoot finished early.  Basically we grabbed Carlos gave him an audio kit and said head North young man.

So now its 4pm, two trucks working, two crews working not too shabby for a day that had slow written all over it 8 hours earlier.  I head back to my desk, check emails, create invoices, make calls and wait until I can call it a day.

Fast forward to 7pm when my cell phone rings and I answer and I hear two words that can only mean trouble is a brewing – “Hello Boss”  I slump to my chair and watch more hair fall out as the one and only K2 explains some engine trouble she is having.  Seems as though a turbo gadget has gone (sorry I am not My Goodwrench so I can never explain mechanical failures) BUT she had a spare, we here at VideoLink are always prepared!  She pulls off to the side of the road, whips out her handy dandy crescent wrench set and goes to town.  Alas – another “hello boss” phone call.  The wrench is too big and she can’t get it over the nut.  So I literally run (quite a site thankfully it was an empty building) to the engineering shop to find smaller wrenches.  I was pulling out every drawer full of tools and sending pictures to her to see if something looked like it would fit and as you might expect nothing fit.  We both came to the realization that the only solution was a call to a towing company.  She makes the call to our towing company and waits for the truck.  At this point, I am heading home for the day and since she ultimately broke down twenty minutes from my house I head to the rest area to keep her company.  As I arrived, the mechanic was there and recommended a tow as there were some rotted lines and he feared snapping them.  So onto the flatbed she goes (Beans not K2) and then we all came to discover one teeny tiny problem.  On the flatbed truck, Beans was 14’2”.  The height for trucks on the Pike was 13’9”.  You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see this wouldn’t work.  The mechanic makes a quick call to his co-worker and 20 minutes later a big ass monster tow truck shows up and the whole process begins again.  Around midnight or so everything was hooked up and off she went with the mechanic to Boston where K2 parked the truck at the hotel, and off to bed she went for a few hours of sleep before beginning her weekend job. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the mechanic as he had about 4 more tows to get to before his day would end.

So the lessons to be learned from all this – 1) TV is never boring and 2) VideoLink may occasionally be down but never out and the job gets done.