PrintWell, it’s Day 4 and I’ve not yet tripped on anything and fallen head over high heels with $8,000 worth of camera equipment (as I was certain I would have done many times over by now). Knock on wood! Actually there isn’t much wood to knock on here in the concrete-and-metal monstrosity that is the Thomas & Mack Center, but lucky for us, our hotel room at Hooters is almost entirely paneled in it.
Yeah, so Hooters is actually a hoot. We have a whole gaggle of journalists and photographers staying there, and it’s clean and comfortable and kitschy, in a good way. Plus, the room service staff makes a mean grilled cheese at 1:00 a.m., and the fleeting moments Molly and I spent reading by the pool yesterday were infinitely restorative.
This job is fantastic, but not nearly as glamorous as one might think. Sleep is a rare luxury, and food is scarfed down as soon as it appears on the table in the pressroom. Equipment malfunctions, scoring confusions arise, and the clock is always ticking. In today’s instant-news era, there’s more pressure than ever to be the fastest and the best. Sometimes we step back and feel that our stress is a bit frivolous and self-indulgent, because it’s not like we’re covering the genocide in Darfur or the global economic crisis, but the pressure exists nonetheless.
Molly, Sara and I were definitely feeling the tension by yesterday afternoon, as three days of nitpicking and tweaking news coverage, photo galleries, Twitter and our blog began to catch up with us. So we took advantage of a two-hour window to go back to the hotel for some quiet time. (Actually this turned into about a one-hour window, because we keep getting lost on the way back to Hooters, despite the fact that the establishment is plainly visible from the Thomas & Mack parking lot. We always end up sitting in gridlocked traffic on The Strip, staring longingly at the fancy fountains of The Bellagio and the faux Eiffel Tower at Paris).
In any case, the 45 minutes I spent with my Charles Dickens novel on the pseudo-beach at Hooters was pretty fantastic. Molly dove into a juicy Vanity Fair article about the Sulzberger dynasty of New York Times fame, and Sara chilled in the room to recoup from her rabies vaccine earlier in the morning.
