Running with the bulls of CNBC

Exactly 10 years ago today I boarded a plane at Hamburg airport on a one-day all-expenses-paid trip to London for a job interview with CNBC, the financial news lies and bullshit channel.

I didn’t get the job, but that’s a good thing. It’s good to know what you don’t want as much as what you do.

Here’s how that day one decade ago went.

05:05. Get up, drink coffee, kiss wife, kiss little red-haired-girl, walk to taxi stand, taxi to airport.

06:45: Flight to London Heathrow.  CNBC could have flown me to City Airport, but I guess they were counting their shekels.

07:20 Arrival Heathrow. The arrival hall / cattle holding pen is already crammed with a party of Japanese when I get to the back of the line, soon to be joined at the rear by a 747 load of chatty Indonesian tourists from Jakarta.

07:35 A previously unnoticed man in uniform stands up on a chair, points excitedly at one of the Indonesians and screams at the top of his lungs YOU THERE! YOU! Put that camera down or it will be confiscated! THERE IS NO FILMING ALLOWED IN THE ARRIVAL AREA!

07:35:10 Silence.

07:50 You know how when you just get past the customs doors you’re suddenly faced with a wad of people, some of whom are dorks holding signs? This is the one and only time a dork was holding a sign with my name on it.

08:25 It’s years before the congestion charge, and London traffic is going nowhere. The interview is at 10, I’ve been sitting in the back of this crushed-velvet barge for a half-hour but we’re barely out of the first roundabout heading from Heathrow to the City.

10:15 About an hour after I could have arrived had I schlepped with the plebes on the tube, I arrive at their offices near St. Paul’s and shake hands all around. They have no time for me, so they say I should just go wander about the newsroom a bit and chat with the people on the desk.

10:30 I discover they’re friendly enough, but my tongue has grown thick in the throat, so I blurt out some inane questions to those gracious enough to pry themselves away from their monitors to pay attention to the guy who’s obviously there for an interview. I silently pray to be plucked as soon as possible from awkward small-talk hell.

10:40 Prayers answered. The boss has arrives and we settle into a three-on-one in his office.

10:44 It becomes apparent that my hopes of working for a big-league news organisation in London based on a show reel of my work I’d sent them a few weeks before is not going to come off.

“We’re looking for someone to report live from the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Do you have any experience doing live reporting?”

The honest answer would have been, “Yes, but I really suck at it.”   Instead I tell them I’ve done lives mostly on radio, but that the switch to TV shouldn’t be much of a problem.

The interview is fast-paced and covers a variety of topics. They would have me being the boss of the Frankfurt bureau, I’d be interviewing people in German but reporting in English and for one brief moment it sounds so appealing, especially to someone who’s been out of a job for a couple of years.

But at the same time, I’m thinking: no. This isn’t for me. I would have been willing to uproot the family for London, but Bankfurt? We were already living in Hamburg. Frankfurt in comparison has about as much to offer as a Gulag sentence, and besides, I couldn’t stand the idea of living away from my family just for the sake of work should we opt for me working down there while they stayed in Hamburg.

12:30 I am so dying to take a piss my back teeth are floating, but we keep it going for at least another half-hour before breaking for lunch at a nearby eatery.

14:15: Alone in the elevator after lunch with a man who’s attended the interview  but not said much looks at me out of the corner of his eye and asks softly in kind of a sly tone, “Do you play the market much?”

Again, the honest answer would have been, “Yes, and I’m dying to pad my retirement account with all the insider trading shit that guys like you have a direct line to every day,” but this time I’m even more honest.

“No,” I tell him. ” I sold everything before leaving Hong Kong, and haven’t looked back. I sleep easier that way.”

A curious exchange.  Was that a test?  Was he trying to see whether I was financially interested in anything I might be reporting on, and therefore in a potential conflict of interest?  Who’s he kidding?   Or was he just asking innocently whether I had any personal experience in markets at all?  But wasn’t the latter already apparent on my resume and show reel?

14:30 Relieved it’s finally over, I shake a few hands and am out the door into a sticky London summer. Three hours to kill before heading to the airport, I head straight to bookstores to load up, grab a beer in SoHo, then the train to Heathrow and home.

21:00 Back in Hamburg. Did it even happen? Yes, it did.

And because it had to do with journalism, money and  farce, it reminded me of this:

A flood of pictures, a trickle of grief

The official memorial ceremony was held 10 days ago on the first day of Spring.  Rebirth, renewal.

Memorial for whom?  Have we forgotten already?

Sixteen people, most of them school students, gunned down in classrooms, in the halls, on the street of any town, because it could happen anywhere – Germany, Finland, Norway, Canada… Don’t kid yourself – it’s not just an American thing.

You know, I really wanted to write something about Winnenden the day it happened, but I just couldn’t.

It was just so senseless, so incredibly mindless, and too close to home somehow.

I was working that day – I work in TV news – and as the wires in their ceaseless, droning regularity upped the numbers over six hours first from two, then to five, to nine, to 11, to 14, to 15, to 16, to 17, then back down to 16, I remained, as usual and as is expected, cooly distant to it all.  Doing my job without thinking about the people involved, whether it’s a school shooting or another boiler-plate Baghdad bombing,  plane crash or 100-storey buildings collapsing into smoke and ash: just chasing after pictures, relaying info to colleagues and staying on top of it all to help make sure our shows were getting out OK.

Until exactly 1455, when about 20 seconds of video came across of a woman – maybe 50, 55 – seen from a long shot, her hands on her face as she’s breaking down in tears, buckling at the knees as a man turns to support her, another beside her at a cellphone perhaps trying to get information, then the next shot from another angle a little later of paramedics escorting the distraught woman to a safe area.

We’re all supposed to remain so professional.  So on the job.   We have to treat the pictures for their value and their content without being affected by them, but as I was phoning to offer them to the editor of the news exchanges as is my job, for the first time in nine years on the desk my voice was actually breaking.

As I saw those pictures come in I was suddenly flooded with thoughts that I could very easily have been the one standing there,  that it could have been my kid in that school, that my wife as a high school teacher could just as easily have been one of the teachers there, that I could one day be the one to get the call that would pretty much destroy the foundation of my life in this foreign outpost.

This in a work culture of passionate indifference, where maintaining a balance between commitment and dedication to the timely distribution of the facts must be balanced by a cool disengagement to their enormity.

I wasn’t the only one to have trouble keeping an iron gaze.

The chief of police talking to reporters in Winnenden that day stood and gave his statements in measured tones, but his eyes flooded wet when he said, “…we’re naturally doing everything we can to support the parents at this time, but I’ve been over there among them and I have to tell you, it’s damn hard to look them straight in the eye.”

I allowed myself to imagine how the parents must be feeling. It was fleeting, but it caught me off guard.  We’re all human, we can’t stop feelings, but like a surgeon with Tourette’s Syndrome, we have to be able to keep them switched off or be unable to function.

In the end I posted something frivolous about Obama chicken fingers which received dozens of comments, but somehow regret it.

A direct message to Yoko Ono: Imagine there’s no Twitter

Ummm… please don’t tell anyone, but I’m on Twitter.

Don’t worry, I hardly ever tweet and have nowhere near the 20-thousand-plus updates like some people I know only via blogging, so my well-entrenched social media avoidance disorder is still intact.

But the other day I somehow realised while playing around on the Twitter directory wefollow.com that with a click of a button I could actually follow Yoko Ono, so I am now doing so.

Since Yoko doesn’t update her status regularly, I soon forgot I was following Ms. Ono. But then, as if in a dream I’d won a lottery I hadn’t even played, the next day I received this bold-faced line in my email inbox:

You have a direct message from Yoko Ono

Yoko, I really, really appreciated your sending me your direct message of Peace, love and understanding. It filled me with great joy to know that despite the asymmetric nature of our budding relationship – you – famous billionaire, me – almost famous wage slave – for the mini-micro-nanosecond that your automatically generated packets flitted down the intratubularities, your message was from you to me and for me alone.

It kind of made me feel like the guy who must have felt while saying, as you tweeted not long ago:

“May I shake hands with the hand that shook hands with John Lennon?”

So in honour of my status as Yoko Ono Twitter follower number 15,482, may I now re-write the song that you must have sung with John Lennon?

By the way, did you know that on that horrible day in December, 1980 when he was so tragically taken from us, I was on a traveller’s high, bouncing from wadi to beach camp in the Sinai desert on a jeep excursion? That we didn’t find out about it until nearly a week later when on our return to Eilat we overheard some people in a bar at the next table shaking their heads about it all while Imagine played in the background?

I’m not famous, so you wouldn’t know that.

Anyway, Yoko. Just…

Imagine there’s no Twitter
If it won’t make you cry
No breakfast updates
To make us all ask why
Imagine all the people
Living off the Net

Imagine there’s no blogging
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to post or download
And no viruses too
Imagine all the spammers
Boiled alive in grease

You may say I’m a Luddite
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll log off
Go outside and have some fun

Imagine there’s no MacBooks
I wonder if you can
No need for feeds or iPhones
Or upgrading your LAN

Imagine sharing music
By trading old vinyl…

You may say I’m on Twitter
Pointless updates one-by-one
I just signed up to join the crowd
And realise it’s not much fun

Lost your job? Maybe that’s a good thing

With unemployment in what’s left of the world’s leading economy rising to its highest level in 25 years today, a lot of people are going to suffer as the tidal wave aftermath of Wall Street’s latest greed bubble washes over the rest of the world.

But losing your job isn’t bad news for everyone.

Take the case of my friend and fellow Canadian Douglas in London. We met in Hong Kong in late 1995 when he was being hired for a new weekly show at the station where I was working. Because they the management twits picked Douglas instead of me to host the new programme, I first saw him as a rival, but after a couple of days on the desk with him I soon got over myself, and we’ve been tight ever since.

Douglas has had a real Hong Kong career. He first worked in radio, then TV, then switched for the big bucks of public relations ’til he – quite understandably – couldn’t stand the stench of all the bullshit any longer, then went back to TV.

About two years ago, he got a job producing for a world-famous provider of television business news in London. I remember how excited he sounded on the phone from Hong Kong about landing the position, how he was finally getting out of this “small town” and hitting the big leagues to work on what’s happening in the heart of old world finance.

But like all expats who’ve already paid the price once for leaving home and establishing another one overseas, in moving to London he had to pay all over again, because in the meantime he’d built up such a good life over a dozen years in Hong Kong.

Douglas had good friends, a loving, long-term partner, a comfortable home, even a rag-top car in a city where driving is a luxury often associated with the very wealthy. And let’s face it: as a successful, white, middle-aged gay man in Hong Kong he was still a hot commodity. In London he’s as common as the man on the platform waiting for the 8:15.

So when Douglas told me yesterday that a show he’d been working on had been cancelled and he’d taken the buy-out they were offering him and his colleagues, I said to him: Fantastic!

Getting bought out is the best news he’s had to deal with in ages. Wu Hu! He can now take the cash, travel a bit, visit family back in Canada for a while before taking up a standing offer to return to the station where we met way back in the mid-nineties.

It’ll be the third time in a decade he’s gone back to them, but that’s OK. It not only demonstrates how highly they value his skills, it shows all of us how important it is never to burn your bridges and to remember who your friends are.

And instead of moaning about another dreary London morning, he’ll once again be able to enjoy breakfast on the terrace in the middle of February amid lush greenery, warm breezes and maybe even the sight of a passing cockatoo before heading out into the sunshine.

Nice life if you can live it.