National Geographic, the update.
Wonderful. Now I have my boss pissed at me.
As soon as I got off the phone with National Geographic, I called my boss’s office. He was in a meeting. No big surprise. He’s always in meetings. Better him than me. I told his secretary what was up, and said I’d wait till he was freed up.
She told me to call BC, since the whole thing would be bounced to BC’s desk anyhow. So I did. BC wasn’t in.
So I called the secretary back. I said I’d just wait for the Bossman. She said to call P instead. So I called P instead. P was the guy who said they’d take it under advisement. I actually gave P a strong case for not doing it, but he said he’d talk it over with a few people and get back to me today.
I called the secretary back. I told her what happened, and she asked if I wanted to speak to Bossman, since he was now out of his meeting. I said sure.
I told The Boss where things stood. His immediate response? “You called the wrong person.” (That is a verbatim quote by the way. Picture it being said in a dead flat voice. Now picture the dread beginning to build in me.) “You should have called K,” he informs me. “K is in charge of handling all the Media.” I apologized. In the background I hear the secretary saying that she told me to call P. “P’s shouldn’t have anything to do with this,” I was informed. All of this conversation continues in that dead flat no-emotion voice. The Bossman uses that voice when he’s angry.
Evidently, the odds are high that P will say yes. If I’d taken it through the right channels, they’d have gotten a resounding “no”.
Just shoot me. And not with a camera.