The Uber Car & Watergate Workday

Monday was one of those adrenaline-draining workdays that almost left me too worn out for evening kung fu.  Almost.

My commuter train was forty-five minutes late on a jam-packed taping day; so I was tense before I could even make it to my desk.  Within five minutes of being in the building, I was informed that the car sent to pick up my first guest of the day was stuck behind an accident, 20 miles from the author’s house.  And his house was 80 miles from the studio.

There are no Uber cars in Maryland farm country!  And driving himself was problematic because he was heading to the airport after taping the show.  In other words, I had a royal mess on my hands before 10 a.m., and I could feel the gray hairs multiplying.

While I was trying to get my guest in and around two metropolitan beltways, my crew was trying to reconnect the power supply to lights and cameras in the studio.  Somehow the weekend cleaning crew left studios A and B completely unplugged – and no one had a reason to notice until it was time to set up for my shows.  Thank God they had the presence of mind not to tell me about reconnection problems until after they were solved – and my guest was flying down Interstate 95 in his own car, with a passenger willing to drive it back to his house.

For the second show both guests were inconveniently early, arriving as we tried to inhale lunch in between the two tapings.  But after the morning’s insanity, I was just glad they arrived without incident.  That show’s controversy was entirely on set, as two Washington legends debated the facts and fiction behind a forty-year-old presidential resignation.

In short, I earned my check today… and was more than ready to lace up the gloves and hit the bags from the moment I heard, “That’s a wrap.”