The job that isn’t on my resume

I’ve spent a lot of time here lately wondering about the viability of my resume. You wanna know what humiliation is? Humiliation is signing up with three temp agencies, all of whom tell you that they probably can’t find anything for you unless you suddenly sprout several years’ experience in welding.

Thus far, I’ve resisted that nagging urge to second-guess the current state of my resume. It lists Fox 46 and KFDF, WACY, 40/29, and explains that I’ve been a stay-at-home dad since 2007. That explains the gap in any employment history between 2007 and now.

But what about the gap between returning home from Green Bay and starting at 40/29? That’s a whole different story: the shortest length of time I’ve ever held a job.

During that space, I held a part-time, three-or-so-day-a-week job at KPOM, back when it was KPOM. (For those not in the know or not in the area, KPOM was Fort Smith’s NBC affiliate; now it’s KFTA, Fort Smith’s Fox affiliate.) At the time I worked there, KPOM had no news; its newscast had been shuttered several years earlier due to a cash shortage that was peripherally connected to a lawsuit filed over something said by the newscast that it used to have. Like Fox and KFDF (and WACY), it was programming-only with no news other than NBC’s national news.

None of which was my concern; I wasn’t promoting anything at this station. Instead, I was working a job that had a time bomb attached to it: I was there to check tapes fresh off the satellite feeds, write refeeds into the satellite schedule if necessary, and in a few rare cases order tapes from the distributors when all attempts to catch either feeds or refeeds fell flat. The time bomb? The position was going to ramp up to full time and become Very Important as the station went into Y2K mode (remember that?).

And then, assuming the Y2K bug didn’t destroy either the station, the network, or the audience’s ability to watch either of the above, the position was going to be eliminated.

It was better than nothing, I suppose. It was also incredibly boring. I’d gone from generating exciting, bizarre, and occasionally off-the-wall ways of promoting programming… to checking fresh-off-the-satellite tapes to make sure they looked OK. The guy who hired me was named, if I recall correctly (it’s been a decade), Steve House, and he always seems like a hell of a nice guy. He admitted more than once that my abilities were being just a little bit under-utilized in that position, and was also a little bit sheepish about the very very temporary nature of the gig. In a way, though, that countdown to unemployment was a bit liberating – he and I both knew I’d be looking for other jobs during that time, I didn’t have to be sheepish about asking to use him as a reference. There was no “up” for me to go to at KPOM… only “out.”

Though maybe I’d had a little something to do with that. Right around Christmas 1999, at the staff Christmas gathering at the station, it was announced that KPOM was about to relaunch its news operation. This was before it was sold to Nexstar by the pancake syrup folks who had owned it for years. The general manager, whose name I had to look up because I didn’t remember it, was a guy named David Needham, whom I used to try to annoy by calling him “Hal”. David decided he’d go “around the horn” to get everyone’s opinion of the upstart news announcement.

When he got to me, I clearly said something he didn’t want to hear.

You see, I’d been in the trenches at a succession of TV stations that didn’t have newscasts. I’d also seen the results of bizarro attempts to kickstart news operations (who here remembers the words “5 New on Fox 46”?) by sheer force of will.

My honest, gut response to being asked if I thought it was a good idea was…it’s a hell of a risk, and one that’ll be a train wreck if it doesn’t take off gracefully.

After I said that, I think you could’ve heard a pin drop in the studio where we all gathered. (Well, he did ask what my reaction was…)

It was pretty clear to me at that point that, if my days at KPOM weren’t already numbered, they were now. Steve was able to keep me on the payroll for a few days after the beginning of 2000, at which point I had survived my shift suddenly expanding to beyond-full-time in preparation (many program vendors were feeding up to two weeks’ worth of programming in advance, just in case all of the satellites fell out of the sky) and had seen it abruptly shrink again with the blazingly obvious realization that yes, we were all going to survive Y2K just fine. I went in to interview at 40/29, and in very short order, I defected from Kelley Highway to Albert Pike.

But other than the resume I shopped around at the time I got the job at 40/29, I’ve never listed the KPOM job. It was a three-month tour (a three-month tour!) that just doesn’t track with a career in TV promotions…and I guess I secretly feared that any prospective employers would wind up hearing the tale of how I opened my mouth a little too wide when asked what my opinion was. 😆