Debate and Rebuttal

I worked my first Gubernatorial (Hehe. Guber.) debate tonight. I've never been to one really. It was interesting though a shame it was with three republicans. I won't be voting for any of them because none of them impressed me (and well I'm registered as a Damn Liberal Dem.)

But all in all it was interesting to watch. My job was originally going to be to take recorded audio and convert the files to MP3s and upload them to our server where the copy desk would then download them and begin transcribing them We had an ambitious goal of offering a full transcript of the debate in the next day's paper which means the audio had to be completely transcribed 2 and a half hours after the debate was over.

Well of course my computer wouldn't connect to the server from the debate site because of all of a bunch of security stuff the company made me put on my laptop so I was completely hindered while trying to do my job. I'd been agitated about the whole audio pressure thing all weekend - to the point of having a dream in which the city editor, a mild-mannered and very nice man, yelled at me and told me I'd let the paper down. He said he'd planned his entire news package around me being able to bring off this audio thing and I screwed it all up. Thank goodness it was just a dream and he had a good chuckle about it when I told him about it. But I think that's the first time pressure from real life manifested itself in my dreams. Weird.

Anyway we had a backup plan which was to have three recorders and we just recorded the debate in thirds. One person recorded the first half an hour and then took the recorder back to the paper so the copy desk could start transcribing. Then the next person did the next half an hour, then I finished up the final half an hour. It worked well enough and in hindsight was probably the best way to do it. Doing it with the MP3s and downloading etc would have needed more planning/training time with the copy desk.

So yeah, the debate was good and the transcript was in this morning's paper and is getting good feedback methinks.