Typical Day
Fletcher Ardent gets the call at 4:05AM. He sits up in bed and stares at his pre-ironed shirt, slacks, and tie. They're sitting on a torn-up recliner across the room, and from their spot in the shadows, they almost seem like the Batsuit hanging in the Batcave. And that would make his cell phone the Bat Signal. He answers it.
"Higher than average morning fog reported on Twelfth Street and Signal Street," his producer says, without so much as a "Good morning, how are you?" It's been a long time since he's cracked a comic book, but Fletcher is fairly sure that Batman was never roused to report on what's essentially wet, blurry air with delusions of grandeur. Then again, Batman was also a millionaire, and he probably never had a rent check due in two days.
Fletcher sighs and hangs up the phone. He gets dressed in about three seconds, then spends ten minutes on his hair. He smiles wide into the mirror, and the glimmer that pops off of his ivory white teeth almost blinds him in one eye. Perfect.
He gets into his 1989 Camry and drives to Twelfth and Signal where, yes, the fog is pretty thick. Not so thick that he or anyone else should have any business running a news story about it, but the standards are pretty low in this town. Nothing really exciting ever happens here. His camera operator, Cindy, is already setting up the tripod.
"Morning," she says, handing Fletcher a coffee. How on earth she had time to get up, buy two coffees, and put that tripod up before he could arrive is beyond him. Fletcher grunts. It's not an unfriendly grunt, more of an "alright, thanks for the coffee. Let me drink this for a second and I'll be right with you" sort of grunt.
Cindy understands. She's known Fletcher for a long time. They finish setting up, run a quick mic test, and Cindy hits him with a three...two...finger point.
"Good morning, Fillsberg, I'm Fletcher Ardent, and this is a special WKDQ weather report." His voice is loud and lively—it sounds as if he's been up for six hours drinking Red Bull. It's perfect.
Fletcher connects back up with the anchor at the studio, and the two have an unimaginably boring conversation about fog for about six minutes. Fletcher's sure that the five or six people watching really appreciate his attention to detail.
The shoot wraps and Fletcher gets back into his car with Cindy, who needs a ride. They head to a cafe where they eat a greasy breakfast, as there's no point in either of them going home for an hour-long nap before the working day begins.
They talk about a feature they'll be running in the afternoon and Cindy looks over Fletcher's résumé for typos. It's no secret that he's looking for a bigger, better job reporting the news—they all are, and the bosses expect it.
They head into the station around 8:00AM, where the producer has a few words of constructive criticism about the fog coverage. Fletcher nods his head and takes the notes, even though he's heard the same things a dozen times before. He's so ready to get out of this town and start covering some real news.
He spends the morning writing up some news stories for the website, then copies a few key points with a more personal take onto his Twitter account. He gets a single retweet. It's a good day for Twitter.
Around midday Fletcher and Cindy head out to film a pre-planned feature at the local zoo. When in doubt, cute animals are always a winner—Fletcher's old editor told him that. That man was fired, but Fletcher's relatively sure the advice was good.
He and Cindy spend a few hours capturing footage when something remarkable happens. Not remarkable like someone solving cold fusion or curing cancer, but remarkable like a red panda walking on two feet while shaking his hips like a salsa dancer.
The zoo asks if they can have the footage to put on their site, and Fletcher says no. He'll run the story, and then deliver the footage back to them framed as WKDQ news footage. The zoo agrees with the terms and Fletcher races back to the studio.
This may not be why he got into this business, but it sure as heck might be the thing that gets him into what he did get into this business for.
His producer loves the shot and wants to turn it into a larger piece on red pandas, uh, in America, or something. It takes Fletcher a few hours to collect stock footage of other red pandas and to assemble it into something that seems sort of like news. He writes a few factoids to read out behind the video, then bookends the piece with his shots of the panda dance. This is pure gold.
The footage goes on air in the early afternoon, but the real value of this sort of video will be online. Once the clips are made into YouTube videos, the station's eighteen-year-old social media intern has never had so much to do. She plugs it everywhere while the station moves on to other matters—basically whatever the afternoon equivalent of morning fog is.
Fletcher's sent out to cover a few more stories, including a car that's been graffitied and an interview with a neighborhood association leader who has a lot of opinions about topiary.
By the time he makes it back to the station around 4:00PM, there are a dozen pats on the back waiting for him and Cindy. The red panda footage has gone viral, and Fletcher's face is right there in the foreground for all fourteen glorious seconds.
Fletcher gets home around 6:00PM and lies down for a nap, but then his phone rings for the second time that day. It's a news producer, but not his news producer. The woman isn't even local; she's from a different city, and a station he's never even applied to.
They want to talk to him about a job. He can't believe it. When he gets off the phone, he drifts off to sleep, finally confident this may be one of the last naps he'll take in this crummy not-Batcave apartment.