Sunday, April 22, 2007

Reality TV at work

I'm assuming this is OK to post, since it's already been blogged about by someone with readership much higher than mine. My employer has been selected as the possible subject of a documentary/reality TV show about day-to-day life at a startup. The film crew showed up on Friday at the warehouse to do some test filming, and if they can actually sell the show, they'd probably be filming us for ten weeks sometime this summer.

I've got rather mixed feelings about this.

First- I can't imagine that we're that interesting to watch. I guess maybe with enough time compression, our work could be made to look interesting, and of course it'd be interesting to have footage to look back on if we "made it big". The CEO's certainly a character, but as far as I've seen, most of the interesting personalities in our company are the folks getting paid ten bucks an hour to scan mail. There just isn't that much conflict on the engineering side, and I really hope it stays that way (though the thought of manufacturing a little Springer-esque conflict for the cameras is intriguing).

Second- having cameras around all day seems like it'd be a big distraction. Constantly gating your words, making sure you don't say something stupid, confidential, etc. Plus there's always the worry that others might really amp up small conflicts just for the sake of good TV.

I guess I'm hoping that if the project does happen, they'll find the engineering group too boring to follow around all day. Marketing people are much more exciting. Right?

More to come- maybe...

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