in sickness and in health
by Bob Cole
on
Nov 8, 2007 at 11:55:04 pm
Today, while fighting some kind of bug, it occurred to me that I have been very very lucky.
Thousands of days, I've gotten up and gone to work, either on a shoot or in an edit suite. I can't recall ever once waking up at 5 or 6 am on a day that I'd committed to working THAT DAY, and realizing that I just couldn't get out of bed.
Today, when all I had was an unsupervised edit with a loose deadline, I couldn't move or the room would start to spin. Personally, I was miserable. But then I thought of how much more miserable I would've been, if I'd been involved with a shoot with a dozen other people involved. Yet that has never happened.
Is it just luck, or does the prospect of paying work (or fear of letting down the client) somehow stave off illness?
Have you ever had to cancel a work-day at short notice, due to illness? If I were a client, that would tend to make me want to hire a place with a deeper bench!
Bob C
MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 2 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
HD-Connect MI
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650
Re: in sickness and in health by Ron Shook on Nov 9, 2007 at 12:47:07 am
Bob,
[Bob Cole]"Have you ever had to cancel a work-day at short notice, due to illness?"
I've been lucky as well. Never had to cancel, but did go down in the middle of a shoot day one time. Fortunately the most complex part was over by that time and my partner was able to finish up without too much extra time lost.
[Bob Cole]"If I were a client, that would tend to make me want to hire a place with a deeper bench!"
I don't know about you, but I have a pretty deep bench of cohorts that I could call upon, and more likely than not, the work would get done.
Re: in sickness and in health by Bob Cole on Nov 9, 2007 at 2:09:56 am
[Ron Shook]"I don't know about you, but I have a pretty deep bench of cohorts that I could call upon, and more likely than not, the work would get done."
True here too, but for those 7 a.m. calls you'd have to start calling your friends at 5 or so to get them there on time. That's a tough phone call to receive, or to make.
MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 2 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
HD-Connect MI
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650
Re: in sickness and in health by Bob Cole on Nov 9, 2007 at 11:07:18 pm
[Pat McGowan]"Fingers crossed, I rarely, if ever get sick enough to "call in". I honestly can't remember the last time I did."
Pat, you definitely sound unusually healthy. I haven't missed a shoot, but I definitely missed one day of unsupervised (and easily made-up) editing this week. It just hit me, Thursday morning, that if it had been exactly a week earlier, I would have been in serious trouble.
I'll bet that there is some cause and effect here: free-lancers and small shops probably tend to get a little burst of adrenalin, or something, which keeps them from getting sick on crucial days. Especially nowadays, when smaller budgets mean shoots with skimpy or no crew. I think I tend to get colds AFTER periods of heavy work.
But meanwhile, I'm going to talk to my circle of free-lancers around here about it. I think I owe it to my clients to have a back-up plan.
MacPro 2 x 3GHz dualcore; 10 GB 667MHz
Kona LHe
Sony HDV Z1
Sony HDV M25U
HD-Connect MI
Betacam UVW1800
DVCPro AJ-D650
Re: in sickness and in health by Bob Zelin on Nov 10, 2007 at 4:09:57 pm
This is a great OT post. I've spoken with Bob Cole about a young editor that I know who always has "back pain". I don't recall Bob's wording about this, but he (kind of) said that you don't dwell on your pain, you just get to work (something like if you have to eat, your not worried about your pain, and it goes away).
This may sound cruel, but this is a standard that I follow. I have to work, so I just don't get sick - or at least I don't let it affect my career and business. I look in awe at giants in our business who have past away, like tech writer Bob Turner, and ProMax founder Charles McConathy, who continued to work and "kick ass" while they were dying of cancer. These men are an inspiration for me. Nothing stops them. Thinking about them, and how they lived their lives, makes me never feel sorry for myself. There is young lady who is a top editor on the AVID-L list, that is in a similar unfortunate situation, and she is back in front of her system, cutting major shows in NY, not letting anything stop her. A true inspiration.
Re: in sickness and in health by Steve Wargo on Dec 1, 2007 at 8:02:22 am
Entrepreneurs are made of something other than flesh and blood which fends off the problems that "employees" have.
I have had employees call in because of a headache. I usually have a final check waiting for them when they recover. Zelin has a name for those people.
Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It's a dry heat!
Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
Sony EX-1 on the way.
