I just turned down an offer to be on telemavision.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I just recieved a phone call from a newscaster type person asking me if I’d be willing to go in front of a camera and describe our family’s food poisoning experience.
We ate a nationwide pizza/gameroom/restaurant chain with the kids in February and we all got sick that night within a few hours of one another. Pretty sick, in fact, projectile vomiting and fevers, headaches, etc. The whole works. Both ends too. Good times.
So I called the health inspector to let him know that I suspected that our family had gotten ill from this particular place. I wasn’t looking for any compensation or leverage, I just wanted to have the place checked out and to make sure no one else gets sick (and to see if anyone else had gotten sick that day).
He reported back a day or two later to let me know that he hadn’t found any major food prep violations, just a few small ones that were corrected before he left. I think they were more prodedure violations than actual food issues.
Since we didn’t get our excreta tested (hey, scrape some of that shit off the carpet/bed/bathroom floor/kitchen sink and bag it for the lab!) We have three little one between the ages of 6 and 3 so there were ‘problems’ all over the house, not to mention the wife isn’t exactly quick on her toes when it comes to getting her sick self to the toilet in time. I, on the other hand, will turn in 4.3/40 times running from the bed to the toilet if I’m going to be sick.

I digress.

A local reporter is apparently doing a story about food poisoning incidents and wanted to give some victims some face time on the 10 o’clock news.
She wanted to meet me ASAP and interview me on camera. I asked her if she wanted more of the story before she drove out here to interview me. She said sure and I told her that the health department hadn’t found any violations, that we didn’t get samples tested, and that we were the only ones to report an illness that day. Basically, I was not comfortable going on the news to talk about an illness which I had no proof of its origin. I turned her down and after a few minutes of talking with me she agreed that that was the correct decision.

Topics of discussion;
-Face time on TV
-Food related illness
-High opal
-My overall moral inegrity :smiley:

2

I do not choose to speculate on whether Opal has ingested hallucinogens recently.

For the rest of it, I think you made the right choice. Perhaps your 15 minutes will come round again at a more opportune time.

This is where I mention (again) that one time while I still lived in France, I was walking up to the entrance of the local mall one lunchtime, and there was a TV news crew standing there. The female presenter said, “Would you like to be on TV?” I said “Non”, and kept walking. She and the cameraman both looked at me as though I was insane.

3

I always wonder at people who will seem to do anything to get on TV or even radio. Do they think they will come off as some heroic figure to be adored afterward? Most just look a bit foolish, gibbering and repeating themself.
About a year ago, I got a msg. from a friend who is communications director for a trade organization. She suggested I be interviewed by a reporter at USA Today who was looking for someone to comment on a particular issue. I declined and suggested another person who I thought was knowledgable. Then I got a call from the VP (also an aquantance) who also, after some appropriate small talk, prevailed upon me to do the interview. I finally agreed and the reporter called me. We talked for ten or fifteen minutes and when the article came out I was attributed w/ one short sentence, which was OK, but it didn’t address my main concern. So, as I suspected in the beginning, I just wasted my time.

4

I say it was a good call. I wouldn’t want to be known as “that guy on TV with the running shits and heaving pukes.”

5

My parents were on the news once because my dad bought a truck that turned out to be a lemon, and the news was doing a “You Paid For It” comsumer investigation story about lemons. That truck had been around. People kept buying it and they kept selling it back because it had problems. And I think the standard CarFax didn’t show it, but I could be wrong.

It was pretty weird to see my parents on the news. I was at work that night, but the crew came to our house to shoot it and stuff.