16 Tons And What Do You Get?

I started work on Goofy Basic Cable Documentary Show two and a half weeks ago.  There are many pluses and minuses about the gig: 

The Pros:

• Work is better than not-work.
• It's a strict 40 hour work week, which is great.
• For the job, the pay is pretty damn good.  Not the highest I've received for the same job, but good nonetheless.
• The content of the show is very entertaining.
• My co-workers are very nice and we all get along very well. 
• The job looks like it's going to be going a lot longer than I thought, which is good.

The Cons:

• The job? Logging.  It's a step backwards from where I was before.
• The office is on the other side of town... the West Side.  On good days, I have a 55 minute commute.  Most days, it's an 1 hour 20.  So, as you can imagine, I'm driving Tom's hybrid.
• The obscenely long commute is cutting into my time I usually reserve for the gym, which means I haven't worked out in about a week. Fortunately, I've been watching what I'm eating so I haven't gained any weight.

Okay, the rest of this will be bullet-less.  In most post-production offices in Los Angeles, we have craft service, which is just industry-speak of Tons of Snacks.  At Evil Production Company, they had their fair share  with bagels every morning.  At Cool Production Company, they had a huge kitchen with tons of sodas, fresh milk, lots of cereals, fresh fruit, etc.  This show?  Coffee, tea, and a soda machine. And I mean, a Coke machine with syrup and seltzer water.  And sometimes the syrup runs out. Now, I realize that 98% of businesses that exist in the world doesn't have luxuries outside of a coffee machine, but a fountain soda machine?  So, I've stashed healthy snacks (read: dried fruit, 100 calorie packs of Trader Joe cookies) at my desk.

Another wrinkle in this situation is the parking situation.  I realize that this is a very Los Angeles complaint, but, well, the company doing this show has its offices in a commercial complex with a very small parking lot.  This means that the rest of us has to park on the street.  I mention this to any Angeleno and their eyes pop out.  Fortunately, we're in a residential district, which means I can park on the street without having to use a meter.  This also means I have to move my car every two hours or else I risk getting a parking ticket. At different times of the day, practically everyone in Post can be seen living the building to go move their car up or down half a block. Even when I worked on The Bachelor (where we didn't have a coffee machine of our own for almost two years), we at least had a parking lot.

All things considered, this logging gig is pretty nice.  The amount of cursing I go through in a day during my almost 3 hours in commuting during the day will be balanced out by the amount of laughing I do when I'm at work and the amount of QT I get at home with Tom.  All in all, the pluses do outweigh the minuses.  Now, if I could only do something about the dumb a-holes driving around the Silverlake reservoir...