Channel 7 News sucks ass.
During the hurricane, while Brent and I were drinking our asses off on the couch, we were watching the storm progress on Channel 7 news. This was, of course, during the hour we actually had electricity.
They had people theoretically on location in The Outer Banks, VA Beach, and on The Roof of The Channel 7 Building. I swear, they must have just sent these poor suckers out with hotel money and nothing else in the way of compensation, because they weren't even trying!
The woman reporting from the Outer Banks absolutely refused to leave the parking lot. Let the reporters from other channels go to the actual beach and brave the surf and wind; she was giving us the exclusive scoop on the conditions in her hotel parking lot. Wearing her horrible pink baseball cap, she pointed out a piece that had fallen off of her cheap ass hotel -- it looked like the hotel was covered in exterior wallpaper, if this piece was any indication -- and pointed out bits of glass she'd picked up from the parking lot. What all of this indicated, besides the fact that Channel 7 wouldn't pony up for a better hotel, I still don't know.
As for the guy in VA Beach, he had on a reflective jacket, which was lucky for the viewers because he was standing in pitch black, supposedly at the shore. You couldn't see anything but the reflective strips on his jacket, but he was pointing out waves and shit like he honestly expected us to see them. I think his team just went into the bathroom, turned out the lights, turned on a fan, and pretended they were at the beach. They must have figured nobody could tell the difference, but we could, even in our drunken state.
The best, however, was the man on The Roof of The Channel 7 Building. Tassy and I had been watching it before the lights went out the first time, and the man had been standing on top of the building with a bungee cord wrapped around his waist and a little device that measured wind speed. Although it looked like a cell phone, so I can't be sure of its function. The bungee cord was fine and understandable. Everyone had been hyped to believe that the winds were going to be 75-80 mph, and the winds would be higher on top of a really tall building. What wasn't alright, however, was the way he kept holding his little wind-measuring device up to the camera to show the viewers its readout. Of course, the readout wasn't showing up on the camera at all. Again, this was an understandable mistake. However, when the power came back on hours later, he was still holding the damn thing up to the camera, in the dark now, like we could see it. The only thing Brent and I could figure was that everyone hated this poor asshole, because otherwise, wouldn't somebody have said something? I mean, in all that time, nobody ran up there and said, "Hey, stop holding that thing up to the camera, because nobody can see it." What the shit kind of operation are they running there?
In other news, I have a fuck of a lot of work to do getting the rest of this page up to date. Maybe.
