The glamorous life of a reporter

For those of you who think I have a really cool job...well, I do. But sometimes it sucks. Like today. It is 6:08pm and I am sitting in a room at City Hall listening to a hearing into whether four city employees improperly received pay raises and bonuses. This hearing started at 9am...they didn't hear from the first witness until almost 1pm. All morning was spent arguing over procedures and whether certain documents could be submitted as evidence. We are currently hearing cross-examination of the second witness. That's two witnesses. Total. There are at least a half-dozen more. Which means we're lucky if this thing wraps up by 9pm. That's a generous estimate. Probably more like midnight. The part that makes me want to stab myself in the eye with a sharpened pencil is that I don't need to listen to all this testimony...all I need for the purposes of my report is a final decision. But that decision won't come until some time tonight. In the meantime, a reporter buddy of mine just stepped out to order pizza for us. We'll probably get a 15 minute break for dinner in about an hour. Woo hoo. After the decision comes, I will still have to do interviews and then put together a version for tomorrow morning. Then tomorrow I have a press conference at NASA at 9am...which means late night tonight, early morning tomorrow. Fantastic.