Today was incredibly interesting. I'm running on very little sleep and a half-sedated mental state from the entire week's happenings. I was picked up at 4:30 this morning by some girls in my Global Leadership program. We drove to the OU airport and met a student's boyfriend where we boarded a six-seater airplane and climbed 10,000 feet. By 6:30 this morning I was watching a beautiful pink sunrise pop up behind the Smokey Mountains.
The more things I do where I find myself needing a suit jacket, or high heels, or nice jewelry the more I feel a certain part of me sliding away. By 8 am we had landed our single engine in Atlanta, Georgia at a small airport where they smacked down one piece of red carpet for us to dismount onto.
At 9:30 I was sitting in a cafe in the Olympic Centinniel Park in downtown eating a blueberry muffin and talking politics and feeling giddy from the two cups of coffee I downed between the two airports.
At 10 we were greeted in the chamber of commerce building by quite a number of people who seemed interested in knowing what a couple of students from Ohio were doing at this conference and who made small talk with us to make us more comfortable.
At around 10:40 we were greeted by the Polish Ambassador to the United States, Janusz Reiter, and sat down to speak with him awhile. Within ten minutes they were rushing us to stand up and have our picture taken with Reiter and shook hands one last time before being ushered into the conference room.As business occassions do in the US this was to start on time at promptly 11 am and our guest at the table was the conference guest of honor.
The conference room had a large number of people and we chose the most inconspicuous table we could find in the absolute back corner of the room where perhaps we might pass through unnoticed.
The US ambassador spoke briefly followed by Reiter and then it was already time for lunch by noon. Table by table they made their way to the buffet. A young man joined us with a name tag that indicated he had achieved his PhD. He seemed a bit awkward but we tried to make small talk.
By the time it was our turn to get dinner I was highly fed up with trying to remember how I was supposed to properly eat at a formal luncheon. I didn't want to care about something so petty. I got my plate of chicken and vegetables with the appropriately sized servings for such proper gatherings and had my seat. By the time my table was ready for dessert I wound up alone with the awkward doctorate chatting away about how cynical he was about his life and job as a computer scientist and how he hadn't learned any French during his three years in Quebec for his Master's. I told him that was a bit of a shame. He agreed. He said his head was just too full of Polish to learn another language. No- he was American, not Polish. I don't think he really spoke much Polish either actually.
Anyway, I dropped a spoon on the floor as soon as I got back to the table and couldn't refrain from quietly uttering the word, "shit". He made a crack about etiquette and then I realized it was only a crack and he was on my side.
It bugged me to have to worry how I was eating my food and if my posture was correct, to wonder if people were judging me. I'm not like that- I don't feel that way. What is it about the world of business that makes you feel that tension? Everything is about appearances. Why can't everyone just act naturally? You can't, you really can't. I felt like Roseanne in a five-star restaurant. You can't just come in laughing your head off and enjoying yourself, you have to button your suit coat all the way to the top and try not to crack a smile unless someone at the podium makes a lightly witty remark and everyone chuckles a bit. Anyway, the whole thing made me tense until the slight conversation with the computer science PhD who didn't seem to know or care about much of anything and didn't even want to do computer science. Ok, I'm doing better than this guy.
The rest of the conference was slightly more interesting, "Poland is great because of this and that; invest in Poland, yada yada yada". The conference ended, we thanked our hosts and decided to stroll across the street to the CNN headquarters.
We had about an hour to spare and the behind the scenes tour was only 55 minutes. $12 per adult ticket. I really wanted to see it, thankfully we had one other journalism major on my side, and a three person crowd that was somewhat interested. we were sold on the tour. I beeped like a bomb when going through the metal detector. The security cop laughed when he used the handheld to scan me all over in my suit and I didn't beep a lick. He said he just didn't know what it was. Well, I guess it doesn't matter much, they let me into a number of Senate buildings in D.C. with a swiss army knife.
We then rode what we later learned is the longest escalator in the world to the eigth floor or this incredibly unique structure, a 5 minute ride of horror in my opinion. The first stop on the tour was a room like a movie theater where we sat and watched the projected images of background scenes. We saw what was being aired at that moment in the middle of the screen, with numerous boxes all around showing the teleprompters, the anchors currently off air, scenes that had yet to be ready to cover the news. We watched several minutes of the Anna Nichole Smith story. After that we were moved to a stairwell where we stood staring across at the rooms of the Omni for around 10 minutes. Welp, that puts the tour down to around 30 minutes left.
Next was a room to demonstrate to screens where everything is projected and the two way mirrors that force the anchors to look at the camera while they read the scripts. Next room- a giant overlook into the newsroom. Ok, this part is cool. There in the center of the room are the anchors, they're broadcasting right there in the middle of mobs of people at their computers. Just sitting putting news together. They had news of September 11th aired in 5 minutes. There are anywhere between 100 and 300 people in the room with the anchors at the same time. If you watch the news you won't hear anything but the anchors.
Then we got paraded down a number of other steps, we were told some historical facts about the building and about the large number of diverse channels CNN actually has. People were walking past us at this point who were not on tour because we were basically in the mall now. We began to realize that we were robbed a bit. I'd say the tour was worth $6, maybe 8 with the rise in minimum wage. It was a cool day, and for me a very interesting one. Not bad, though. Not bad at all.
