A close friend writes:

A-

Sorry I couldn’t make lunch today. I’m working again
at another job that I hate, and even though it’s not
the world’s highest position, it’s in TV with all the
horrendous “crisis” situations that make finding or
not finding a picture of Lindsay Lohan trashed, into a
tragedy for the editor, the producer and me.

It’s made me think…do I really want to work in TV?
And for a long, long time the answer has been no. I
don’t have an answer for what I want to do, but I
don’t want to waste my time working on collaborating
on projects that I cannot possibly see through. By
personality, or ego or intelligence…. I’m just
temperamentally unsuited for television and to work in
it kills me a little each day.

I’m here sitting at this Dilbert desk in bug ridden,
urine smelling old theater building in Hollywood where
the “CEO” arrives to work on a skateboard and has the
PA dress the elevator with a shower curtain to “give
it a little class”. The monsters of Reveille have
marched through here, dropping insults and orders and
calling one editor “fat-boy”.

I’m being micro-managed and hen-pecked and stepped
upon with all the petty dumbness of a job that demands
mastery of every celeb photo site and keeping an
editor supplied with enough images to turn out 60 two
minute commercials a day of Paris drunk, Lindsay’s
car crash, Britney’s baby , etc. I can barely leave my desk
to pee for fear that another set of images are needed
so that the lawyers and the website can upload the
shit by 8pm tonight in Bill Gates’ hometown.

Here is what I see: sour faced fat editors, who sit in their
darkened booths all day,playing with iPhones and surfing Facebook,
acres of xCel rows on my screen that grow and grow with labels and names
that will never be comprehensible, “celebrity” contestants
who are eager to participate in a show that is aired on a
website that nobody visits…..

Yesterday, I left the job.

Regards, Larry