Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Way To Go, You Guys

I DO SOME FREELANCE WORK FREQUENTLY at a television network known as NBC. Perhaps you've heard of it? Anyway, one of the fun things that happens, at least in Burbank (can't speak for the NBC in New York), is that you get to overhear the NBC Pages giving their tour spiel to tourists.

Normally, you hear the same five or ten things being said to the tourists, but recently I heard something I had never heard before. I think it was probably prompted by a question asked by the tour group. You see, at one point in the tour, the tourists are just feet from the NBC commissary. A place that must seem very special and magical to them, because they are not allowed to go there. Not even for an ice-cold beverage.

So, a couple weeks ago, I heard a page say this to a group. "Well, the commissary used to be part of the tour. Until one of you guys went up to one of the stars of Days of Our Lives and bugged her while she was eating. So, we can't go there anymore, because you guys screwed it up."

She kept saying "you guys" as if the people in the tour group were related to or somehow knew the transgressors of the story. Even if the story is true, it's not like it just happened. I've worked there off and on for the last six years and they've never allowed the tour groups into the commissary during that time. But the page in question was so testy with the tour group, as if it happened on her watch (which it couldn't have) or as if these tourists themselves had done it.

Or, better yet, as if "tourists" were a separate class of people (from Gran Tourismo maybe) that had to be punished as a group, like preschoolers who wouldn't settle down. And now nobody got to have Fruit Cup Time.

Way to go, you guys! Good one! Way to ruin it for everyone else!

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