(Obviously the other hand is occupied.) Not so much an appropriate story to share at 99 percent of workplaces out there. And yet, at mine, it ended up coming in handy, pun very much intended. I write for TV, which by all accounts, including my own, is a very neat job, not to mention one subject to a lot of cult-ish fascination. (There are no fewer than eleven podcasts dedicated to unearthing the many mysteries of “the writer’s room.”) A fellow TV writer friend came home complaining about the travails of “the room” so often that her 7-year-old son asked his Catholic school if they could dedicate their morning prayer circle to his mom, who’s been “trapped in the room.” The teacher called home to make sure there wasn’t a Brie Larson thing going on. On the surface, writing for a comedy television show seems pretty straightforward. Most people I’ve met seem to think it means getting paid a lot of money to sit around a table and tell jokes all day, which is…not entirely untrue. Most people also think they could probably do it if someone would just let them. (By “most people” I mean “men I’ve gone on Bumble dates with.”) But what’s maybe not entirely apparent is that working on a TV show requires literally giving your life-or at least intimate, sometimes excruciating, details of it that you may not even share with your spouse, friends, or therapist. Rogers, but imagination isn’t everything.
