Monday Off To A Bad Start

I was woken up early this morning by my work cell phone going off. "We need you to head to Painesville. There's a fire at a trailer park and they're talking about removing a victim from the trailer."

"Ummm..uh...whazzit? Oh, OK", I stammered and tried unsucessfully to focus on the alarm clock. I tried to turn it off so it wouldn't wake my wife but wound up turning it on by accident. I get dressed in semi darkness and head downstairs. When I get downstairs to brush my teeth, I find I have mismatching socks. Great.

I get to the fire without incident and drive right up to the trailer. I shoot video and no one tries to stop me. I thought the trailer park was private property but no sign was around to be seen so I slipped in behind the fire trucks. I quickly fired off a few minutes of video and got out.

On the way back to the station, I stopped off at Taco Bell because at 1:00a.m. they're still open and a 7-layer burrito would be my lunch. So, on I go back towards Cleveland, pretty happy. I've got my fire video and my 7-layer burrito. Could life get any better??

Nope. That was about as good as my day would get.

I get back to the station, get out of my news unit and step into a pile of mud that had fallen off a previous news unit. Crap. Ok, well, I can live with that and I head into the building. I enter our photog lounge and get ready to ingest my video. I take my Mini-DV tape and put it in the machine...

And hear the groaning and creaking of gears and tape as they're stretched and pulled in opposite directions. A message pops up saying, "Deck in an unknown state."

What state? Delaware? I hit eject and it didn't want to give up the tape. I hit stop and then hit eject again and the machine finally relinquished it's death grip on the mini DV tape.

I slowly pulled the tape out of the slot and along with the case, came about three feet of tape out of the machine. Sadly, my tape was eaten by an apparantly hungrier tape deck.

That has to be the worst sound imaginable.