Political Fundraising Is Costing Me My Dream Gigs

This may be a pipe dream, and so holding onto it may be increasingly pathetic, but I still want to be a sportscaster one day.  No, I'm not doing much to turn that dream into a reality.  What I do do is remain on the periphery.  I still get jobs helping around production trucks, mainly for Vikings Games but I have done the Twins, Golden Gopher football, and the Wild.  It makes me think I haven't completely wasted my journalism degree.  And maybe, just maybe, if I hang around and prove my worth, maybe I can latch onto something permanent.  But like I said, I'm not going out there and grabbing the opportunity by the horns.  No, I'm waiting for someone to ask me out of the blue, "Hey -- have you ever thought about doing this full-time?"

As such I am far from full-time now.  I am at-will.  I can be fired for any reason and for no reason.  And I don't have to be hired back, either.  Now, I have been hired for ... golly, I think it'll be two decades this upcoming fall, and I like to think it's because I'm a good person and a hard worker.  But I'm under no illusions that it could all be taken away without a trace.  I would be totally heartbroken.  But that is how the job, or the gig, is right now.

Traditionally, I have been asked if I can work through e-mail.  Some time before the event -- for big ones it'll be months in advance, but other times I've been asked the week of -- I get an e-mail asking if I am available to work a Game, or several days leading up to the Game.  I usually say yes.  In fact, there has been only two times where I have told the production team I cannot work for them ... and now that I think about it, both assignments I had to miss because I was on a big vacation that centered around my sister: I missed a Twins Game many, many years ago (which may have been the last one I was offered until I worked on back in September) to attend my sister's destination wedding in Siena; and I missed the Vikings' epic comeback Win over Indianapolis back in mid-December for a family vacation to Hawai'i centered around my sister's doctorate graduation.

I have, thankfully, been asked back to work.  Not to say I think ill of them, but my paranoid side always thinks that if I reject them once, they may not feel the obligation to reach out to me again.  But they have despite me telling them no.  Would they continue to reach out if I don't say anything to them at all?

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I've gotten a bit more politically active after Trump and the Republicans cheated their way to winning power in 2016 (and they did, don't lie, they did, shut up).  After that I stepped up my ... well, I really shouldn't say activism, but I put my money where my mouth is by giving cash to Democrats and Minnesota members of the Democrat-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party.  Citizens United should still be banned, but until we can ban it, we have to use it, I'm afraid.

The downside to willingly handing over money to politicians who need money in order to advertise in order to win and gain or hold onto power is that they bombard you, incessantly, with political appeals.  I have gotten so many of these goddamn things, and now, most of them are from campaigns and people I did not give money too.  Once you donate, you get put on a list, and these campaigns sell those lists to other like-minded politicians (I'll never get a missive from a Republican, thank God) because frequently, that's the only way they keep making money.  Then those fucking people bombard me with political appeals.  I get them by the hundreds each day.  Still.  Even though this isn't an election year.  One night, when I was tired, I decided not to check my e-mail.  That stretched to several nights in a row, and when I finally got around to checking my e-mail, I had a thousand unread ones.  And then I got caught up with too much stuff and yadda-yadda-yadda, I now have 40,000+ unread e-mails on my main e-mail account.  I have an older e-mail account that has, oh, God knows how much.  I am now years behind on both, and as much as I try to unsubscribe, I'm sure at least 85% of the e-mails I get nowadays are from politicians trying to hit me up for money.

I should sit down and go through them.  I really should just delete them all.  But most of the time I'm so distracted with other things that I let it metastasize, and when I do confront my inbox, my eyes glaze over.  There's a fucking blizzard of these appeals, and it's gotten hard, pretty fuckin' hard, to find the non-spammy e-mails ... such as the ones from the productions asking me if I want to work for them.

I knew this was going to happen.  But I wasn't diligent enough.  The first time I missed reading an offer to work was for a Wild Game late last year.  This one was offered via text.  Hey, did you know that when you give money to a campaign, not only do you give them permission to e-mail you to kingdom come, you give them permission to text you to kingdom come as well?  They're not as bad as the e-mails; at worst I get about a dozen a day, and many of them seem to come from the same "phone number," so any new messages from that same source is collated together and presented to me as just one long series of texts from the same "people."  But there still are so many that I ignore them.  I did not see a text from a crew person asking me to do this Wild Game.  I found it months later when I was going back through months-old texts from politicians that I couldn't be bothered to deal with (the e-mails, not the politicians, although they're also one and the same) at the time.  I profusely apologized for not getting back to her.  But I haven't been asked to do a Wild Game since.

I have finally gotten around to doing quick searches that will filter through only any e-mails that have the name of the league and "Minnesota" on them, thereby increasing the chances that I will see only offers to work.  And I found one either yesterday or earlier this week.  Unfortunately, it was for a Gopher football Game back in November.  I didn't see it for eight months.  I want to e-mail the person and apologize to her, but that would be so goddamn awkward that I don't want to jeopardize future employment with the network she works for.  

So just now I did those searches again, and I got another one.  It was for the Golden Gopher football team's season opener against Nebraska.  It's on the Thursday just before Labor Day, just like Minnesota's season opener in 2021 vs. Ohio St.  I was able to work the several days leading up to it.  Back-breaking work, but the money was too good to pass up.  And beyond that, I used my paid time off at work to work the Gopher production.  I was double-dipping.  And I have few regrets.

I thought that I could be offered a similar position this year.  I waited and waited, but I hadn't heard anything.  I believe I was asked a month before that Game against the Buckeyes, and so that was the reason I did a search in my inbox just now.  And wouldn't you know it, I saw that e-mail, unread, from Wednesday, received around noon.  I e-mailed the person back -- oh, around 11 p.m. last/Thursday night.  That's a gap of a day and a half.  That previous Gophers football gig from two years ago?  Someone e-mailed me late at night, and I responded overnight, around four hours later.  I have lost jobs to people who responded to the crewer faster than me.  I hate that, and I directly blame my tardiness in finding and responding to those e-mails on the firehose of campaign donation appeals.  If they weren't there, I would have seen that e-mail faster than I did.  Simple as that.

So I e-mailed the person saying yes, I am available and interested in working.  I didn't apologize for essentially ghosting her.  But I would if it ensured me this job.  But this person had a whole day and a half to find someone else.  Pray that I still get to work this gig.  I need to make some fucking money, man.