Rob Got A Job!

For the last few weeks I've been working hard to prove myself with the internship at Sci Fi Channel. The assistant whom I was working primarily with had been offered another job within our office, so when I came they were already looking for her replacement. Over time as I became more familiar with the operations of the office, I put my name in the running for her position. Last Friday, the bosses sat me down and finally offered me the job! They had been interviewing for weeks and they had very good candidates (with more office experience than me), but I think that my hard work and late hours had been noticed. So, though I'm sure they also saw me as competent, they decided to reward my drive and passion.

My new title at the Sci Fi Channel (owned by NBC/Universal, which is owned by GE) is Assistant to the Vice President of Alternative Programming. In a nutshell, I'm a secretary. In the business, they call me an "assistant". Almost every executive and producer in Hollywood has "paid their dues" at some point by working as an assistant for an agent, producer, network exec, or various bigwig. So now my time has come to pay my dues by answering phones and managing calendars. I committed to work with them for a year, but I'm looking forward to it. I will learn a great deal about the TV business in general and make many valuable contacts by being a part of the mainstream media "machine". Though Sci Fi is a cable network, we work closely with our parent company of NBC.

Yes, I still have to commute for 3 hours every day, but I can be productive with most of that time on my laptop (riding the bus, train, and subway). The people in my office are great, it isn't very cutthroat like many networks, and the work is steadily getting easier as I become more familiar with how things work. The shows that I work on will be a little less interesting as I am on the "alternative programming" side. That means reality shows, docu-dramas, and late night. But I know all of the people who make the interesting scripted shows like Eureka, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, and the upcoming Flash Gordon. The important thing is that when my year of servitude is up, the influential friends that I have made there will open up many doors that would be otherwise completely unavailable to me...

I'll send pictures of my commute and office sometime soon. It's been fun working at a large corporation (never done that before). I have to swipe a security card to get in to the 30-story bldg where I work, and there are occassionally "NBC family" town hall meetings that we watch in our office via video link. This helps me to see a side of the corporate world that I only read about during grad school and heard from friends in mega-corps like Wal-Mart.

So I'm having fun and very grateful for this opportunity. It's my foot in the door to a career in Hollywood - something that many others are still struggling to find in this town. We still miss Siloam and our calm, easy life there. But we know that this is still where we are suppose to be. Jenny is enjoying her work at BIOLA more and more, but I expect that we'll probably be moving north to LA sometime in the next couple of years. Thanks for your interest. I'll try to give more updates soon, but since I only get a couple hours of awake time at home each night, time has become much more precious. Take care, all!