KBTV

Prioritizing is a bitch. And some people are better at it than others. I’m not at all sure where I fall on the spectrum, but I’ll suggest to you that I am someone who tries to do too much, stretches herself too thin and tries to simultaneously please too many people. This would place me below sea level on the prioritizing front, I’m sure.

I poured the proverbial bucket of cold water over my own head yesterday morning, beginning sometime around sunrise. I wish it had been the dousing we see on television — the mammoth immersion of ice-cold Gatorade dumped on NFL coaches at the end of a game ending in a come-from-behind victory. No, it was an entire day of frigid shock and horror, like a steady stream of melting snow that I dip my bandana into when I’m hiking at high altitudes. It didn’t stop until the FedEx deadline at 5 p.m.

It all started last week when I was asked by one of my media partners out in Los Angeles for 92 episodes of archived KBTVonline episodes. Simple enough, I thought. I’ll copy the shows onto a series of DVDs, organize them alphabetically by title and create a nice, neat, Corporate-esque packet — set to ship at deadline.

Not. What a nightmare.

Camera pans back nine months…
I’m chatting with one of my mentors on the West Coast who kindly (and helpfully!) suggests that I create a series of libraries. First, he said, I should catalogue all the KBTVonline episodes by name and slug the Quicktime files the same title as the actual shows which air on YouTube. Next, I was expected to create a tape library, cataloging all the raw footage that was used to actually cut the shows. THEN, I was strongly urged to create ANOTHER library of the actual shows themselves employing the following process: Save the files onto an external hard drive, and when that fills up unplug it put it in the back of the closet and hook up another external hard drive to save the next batch of shows until that got filled up and I unplugged it and put it in the back of the closet — and so on and so on.

Ug, I thought, He’s so dull! Why are engineers so boring?

Camera pan forward to Monday morning (yesterday.)…
I begin my mission. Let’s just say that by noon — covered in alternating layers of sweat, dust and carpet fuzz — boring engineerishness looked really good. I’ll spare you the minutiae, but let’s just say I combed through mountains DVDs, dead hard drives, individual computers, external hard drives all day long. In one case, I spent 45 minutes desperately searching for a show called “Bovine Bonding: The Raw Milk Debate.” Finally I located it on an external hard drive peeking out from under the bed in my guest room. The file name? “Cow Drama.” Next, I ransacked a DVD case for a show called “Spank me with Spanx!” I ended up finding it slugged under “KBTV.04.10.07.” The entire day morphed into this dark, evil and looming 5 p.m. FedEx deadline. I nearly passed out in the studio. Instead of asking for my signature on the credit card slip, the woman behind the counter in the brightly-colored baseball cap asked me if she should phone 911.

What was so important that I couldn’t make at least ONE library of my shows? What had I been doing for the past nine months? And then I came across this photo…