Story #10: Your Local Anchor(wo)man

I rarely watch the local news.  I rarely watch TV at all.  I get my news from the internet.  This means I never hear about sweet local kitties stuck in trees, but I honestly don't care.  So I guess I never really wondered what anchormen and women do in the 'downtime' when the weatherman or remote reporters are doing their parts of the news.

But today I found out.  I was on Gmail chat, and received a message from my closest friend from high school who is a reporter for a local station in Tulsa, Okla.  She said hi, as many messages often begin.  Then she told me that she was anchoring the news. She is technically a reporter, but does some anchor shifts on occasion, so I thought she was just telling me (for whatever reason) that she was anchoring later that night.

Nope.  What she meant was that she was anchoring at that moment.  Apparently, they were in the weather section, so she signed on to Gmail while sitting at the anchor desk.  I guess it just seemed odd because I assumed that they would be expected to be focused on the news and on the show itself for 100% of the news hour.  I am apparently wrong.  When you are hearing about tomorrow's 30% chance of rain, the anchors are chatting away about nonsense or maybe even looking up internet porn.  I mean, who really knows?