Pussy Willows in Old Crow
Throughout my professional career I have been fortunate in that most of my bosses have been great. However during a two year stint as CBC reporter here in town, I ended up working for a man who put me off my scotch - literally.
The guy was a good writer - I'll give him that. And he was driven to succeed....I guess he'd started off rather late in life as a reporter and felt he had lots of catching up to do to reach his goal of National Reporter for CBC (he has since gone on to report for CBC in various places around the world). But he had zippo people skills. And he never let the truth get in the way of telling a good story.
Many a time I would take something to him I had written only to have it 'altered' because it 'flowed better that way.' I would fight with him about it of course, but it never seemed to do any good, and more often than not my name was associated with a piece of journalism that was injected with fiction.
Since fighting didn't work, my next plan of action was to pitch innocuous stories that I hoped would slide in under his radar screen. However even the innocuous ones sometimes got me in trouble. Like the one about pussy willows in December.
It was Christmas Eve morning and I was on the early shift. It was spring-like weather, all the snow was gone, and a listener called to say that pussy willows were growing in one of the subdivisions around Whitehorse. The weather office was reporting rain in Old Crow, the Yukon's most northerly community. I decided it was just the kind of story that the CBC National desk would lap up, especially on a slow news day such as this. So I quickly produced something, sent it off, and it ended up as one of the top stories on the World at Eight.
Nine o'clock rolls around, and a very angry boss comes storming in. He wanted to know why I hadn't told him I was doing this story. He was critical of its content. Why, for instance, had I not checked to see if pussy willows were also growing in Old Crow? Trying to explain to him that the 24 hour darkness at this time of year in Old Crow would have made it impossible for anything to grow there didn't help. He ranted and raved to the point where one of my colleagues was in tears for me. I just got mad and walked away. Luckily I had an assignment outside the office, so I could get away from him for a few hours until he cooled off. It was only later that I realized he was angry that it was I and not he who had gotten the national exposure (yeah, like a story of pussy willows in December was going to put me in line for a national reporters job!!)
That afternoon, he came to us reporters with a big smile on his face and a bottle of scotch. 'Let's have a drink to celebrate Christmas,' he said. I looked at him in disbelief. Four hours earlier, he had made one of his reporters cry, another one so mad she could have ripped out his reproductive organs, and now he wants us all to sit around and be jolly? I declined and went back to work. He insisted and poured me a drink. I guess it was his way of apologizing. I decided to try to be gracious and took a sip. But as much as I love scotch, I couldn't get it down me. The rest got left in the glass, where I found it after Christmas and threw it down the drain. Ho ho ho!
6:44:34 AM 
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