Counting down, occasionally counting up (Human Pursuits 22/1/22)
On crashing, burning and (eventually) building trust with CBC's Adrienne Pan
VANCOUVER – I’ve only had to make a couple hard phone calls in my life. Unfortunately one of them was to Adrienne Pan, the CBC radio host, and my former co-worker, who died last Saturday. She was 43.
It was 2014 and I had recently moved back to Edmonton after finishing my degree in Ontario. After a few months adrift, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of the house my sister and her now husband were renting, and working data entry as a temp for a construction company, I found myself in the unusually fortunate position of working for the public broadcaster as an associate producer, or someone who helps create the show. My friend Emily was going to visit her brother in China, and they needed someone to work her TV news shifts on evenings and weekends. Apparently it was a hard sell because yours truly was asked to step in despite having never worked in broadcast news.
The first few days went better than expected, although that isn’t saying much. I mostly shadowed Emily around the office, pulling archive tapes, and excusing myself to the restroom every hour or so to dab at the sweat stain steadily expanding across my armpits. While my lack of experience left me feeling self-conscious, it left Adrienne, a veteran broadcaster with a reputation for hard work, understandably mystified. Still, there were aspects of the job I immediately enjoyed: writing scripts, editing tape, being part of a team. In fact, the only part of the job I didn’t like, that caused my heart to palpitate and my guts to spill out literally every shift, was the thirty minutes the show was on air. Thirty minutes in which I was no longer an associate producer, but an assistant director.
On paper the duties of an assistant director were, at least at that point, pretty straightforward. Mostly you kept track of the show’s timing, using a big master clock above the control room monitors to help sort out if the show was getting heavy, or over time. But there was also the matter of triggering the commercial breaks. Without getting too technical, commercials are pre-programmed and only sort of controlled by the people in the show’s control room. This is mostly fine, except it means that once a block of commercials starts, it can’t really stop, as Adrienne and I discovered on my first shift flying solo.
Eight years on, my main memories of that shift are mostly just feelings. I remember wanting to impress Adrienne, to prove that I was not only competent but trustworthy. Someone she could rely on, and maybe even invest in. I also remember that things went more or less smoothly when it came to putting the show together. Which is a shame because things went off the rails right as we went into our first commercial break. A post show analysis would later reveal that I hit the button that triggers the commercials not once, as is standard, but twice – a real go-getter, bootstrapping sorta move, until you remember that means two blocks of commercials fired back to back. For a more experienced assistant director this would be an embarrassing but fixable bit of turbulence. For me, in that moment, it meant the plane was going down. [Editor’s note: I may have watched too much Yellowjackets this week]
Under normal circumstances the big clock, which I mentioned earlier, counts down from thirty minutes, so that everyone in the room knows when the show is set to end. You can imagine my surprise, then, when the clock that I had only ever seen count down, was suddenly beginning to count up. I could try to explain why this happened, but the only thing you need to know is that what happened next shaved years off my life. From the set Adrienne asked: “How long until we’re back?”
I responded “I don’t know.”
Not great.
She then asked, what I think we can all agree was a fair and reasonable follow up: “Well what does the clock say?”
I responded “I don’t know.”
It’s a wonder she didn’t come beat me to death with my own headset. It might’ve saved us both the trouble. Instead she stood at the desk, thinking.
“The clock is going up,” I said.
Have I mentioned this was not great?
And it somehow went downhill from there. Without knowing how I had screwed up, we were never really able to get the show back on track. Adrienne was forced to ad-lib a bunch of scripts, and I think we wound up cutting her off at the very end because we were out of time. If there are trials by fire then this was an inferno. I apologized to Adrienne after the show, but I knew I was well outside the circle of trust. I took the bus home to St. Albert and wondered if I had completely blown my shot.
~~
The next morning, I still felt terrible. So I decided to do the only thing that felt right. With shaking fingers I called Adrienne’s cell phone and apologized again. I’m a little fuzzy on the details of our conversation, but I remember looking at the endless Alberta sky, dotted with clouds, as I promised Adrienne a mistake like that would never happen again on my watch. Incredibly, she agreed to let it go. To give me another shot. In doing so, she single handedly saved my career. Or rather gave me a career. And in doing so, she taught me what it meant to be a leader. A standard was set, and I would do everything in my power to exceed it.
Within a few months, the shrapnel embedded in our minds from that night became a sort of scar tissue connecting us. It was an anecdote to share with new people on the team, living proof that even the worst case scenario is survivable. We never said it explicitly, but Adrienne trusted me and I trusted her. How could I not?
And yet, life moves on. In 2015, I moved to Vancouver. Adrienne moved to radio, which always felt like her real passion, shortly after. By 2018 she was hosting Edmonton’s afternoon radio show Radio Active. I regret that we didn’t stay in touch. I think, I assumed, there’d be more time, forgetting that the clock is almost always counting down. Except in those brilliant, rare moments when it’s suddenly counting up.
Comments, criticisms, collaborations? Email me at ethan@humanpursuits.org, or follow me on Twitter and Instagram.