Closing Time  

An adult today will change jobs an average of 11 times in his or her lifetime.

11 times!?!?!?!
That's 11 anxiety-ridden first days as "the new girl". Potentially 11 moves, either to different office buildings around your city or to different states on opposite sides of the country. 11 periods of life where you can still use "learning the ropes" as a viable excuse (if only for a few days). 11 chances to make a first impression.

If I'm being completely honest, I didn't make a very good first impression at my job.

Oh sure, I fulfilled the job title. I never let my newscast dip into "black" (this-- other than allowing someone to say one of the seven "deadly" words live on air-- is one of the top offenses in television news; you'll know it's happening when see no picture and hear no sound in the middle of a local newscast, even though your television is still on... and trust me, it happens more than you think!). I showed up on time. I never left early.

But I was inflexible. I was stubborn. Despite the fact that it was only my second job in the industry (and my fourth overall, which leaves me with seven more jobs ahead of me), I was undoubtedly sure that my judgment was fail-safe (of course, it wasn't). I never managed to erase those first impressions I created in the early weeks of my job, more than four years ago; it's really true that you "never get a second chance to make a first impression."

Now, I'm trying to do something totally different: I'm trying to leave a lasting impression.

Today is officially my last day as a "working" mom (I say use the "quotation marks" there because after reading the comments on my last post, I know I really am moving on to a fifth job). By the time the clock strikes midnight, my job, much like Cinderella's pumpkin-coach, will be no more.

I told my bosses more than 10 weeks ago that I would be leaving the TV station, so my departure is no longer a surprise to anyone. What is a surprise-- I think to myself, more than anybody else-- is how much I've managed to care about the quality of my work, right down to the bitter end. I expected, somewhere along the way, to develop a severe case of "senioritis"-- you know, the affliction that affects last semester high school and college seniors who know graduation is in sight and can afford to coast the rest of the way.

Let's be honest: I'm leaving this job-- and the TV news industry as a whole-- because I don't like it. I never did. I begged my parents to let me drop out of my graduate program in journalism six weeks in. I knew it wasn't for me, but because in my family "you finish what you start," I muddled through. Here I am, six years later, finally doing what I suppose I should have done back in 2004.

So if I don't like the job, or the industry, and don't plan on ever coming back... why do I still care? I'm trying to figure that out. I'm trying to figure out why in a few hours, I'm going to plot out what I hope will be my best newscast ever. No one is expecting it to be my best; in fact, there are probably people who think I will mail it in and spend the night glad-handing around the newsroom. Maybe that's not my style (well, I'm a Type-A person, so it's definitely not my style). Maybe I care more about this business than I thought. Maybe I'm making a (gasp) mistake leaving it behind.

I don't think that last hypothesis is the case,
but the jury's still out.

I've spent the last six years trying to figure out how to make it in TV. In that time, I've created more than a thousand newscasts. I've been nominated for awards. My work has won some of those awards, including an Emmy last year for our funeral coverage of a fallen police officer. Yet I've never felt satisfied. Content. Whole. There has always been something lacking for me in this career.

Maybe that's why I'm working so hard to leave a good last impression... I'm trying to leave it all on the table, so I know when I look back in 20 years, I can know I gave it all I had and finally have no regrets.