The Premise
by Joel Tianello
“Thank you. Yes, Monday morning,” Dan said as he hung up the phone.
He sat quietly in his office staring down at his desk in a state of shock, at least until the second call came.
If he’d had a better week, Dan, “Danny” to his friends, Randolph would have left the Boston Globe on better terms. He would have looked back on the last six years of his career as a learning experience filled with positive contacts, office friendships and memorable columns that had won him a place in the hearts of thousands of greater Bostonian area Globe readers.
Dan would have not only finished this week’s column, but also offered to provide the next two week’s columns as well, so management wouldn’t have to worry about filling any of his inches that month.
He would have been happy to do that.
If he’d had a better week.
As far as Dan, Danny to his friends, was concerned, this had been a shit week.
On Monday, he saw his column had a third cut out of it to make room for more ad space.
On Tuesday his Jetta broke down.
On Wednesday, Johnson, the editor from Hell, ordered him to drop everything he was doing to write a sidebar on the human interest side to the bus driver strike.
He had interviewed three drivers and two old ladies dependent on public transportation, only to find out Thursday that all 25 inches had been scrapped to make room for ad space.
This all made him look back on the past six years in a different light.
It made him remember all the late nights. It made him remember the two years they cut him back to part time and he almost had to move back to his parents because he was so broke. It made him remember the ulcer he developed before he was thirty. It made him remember the relationships that were ruined by his impossible schedule.
In fact, the most meaningful relationship he’d had in recent years was an office flirtation with Andrea.
It made Dan remember all of the things that made him yearn to get out of the newspaper business, all of the things that made him pour over his scripts at night, all of the things that made him overcome his fear of flying, use his vacation time and spend almost all of his nestegg to go to L.A. for a week of interviews and auditions.
So, Friday, when he got the call from a production assistant saying they wanted to hire him for a show that already had a four-episode commitment, he felt a kind of liberation he didn’t know was possible.
When the phone rang the second time, and Johnson began barking at him over the line, it was -well, to say the least- poorly timed.