The Daily Routine

Everyone gets into those ruts in which it appears like the same thing happens every single day when you're working. I was no different. During most of 1995, I had a pretty stringent daily routine that made it seem like I was living "Groundhog Day" over and over. You'd think that the nature of monitoring news would indicate that wasn't the case, but it almost wasn't.

I would get up at 4am. The first thing I would do was grab a couple of raw eggs out of the refrigerator, put them in a pot, run water over them and then start boiling them. I would set a timer for 21 minutes. I found this was the perfect amount of time for eggs to completely boil.

I would take a shower while they were boiling. This typically took about 10 minutes, giving me plenty of time to get dressed before I needed to take the eggs off the stove. I would take the pot over to the sink and run cold water over them until the water stopped feeling hot. Then I put two pieces of bread in the toaster. While the bread was toasting, I would unpeel one of the eggs. By the time I was finished, so was the toast. I squashed the egg between the two pieces of toast. I removed a piece of toast, put some salt and pepper on the egg and a slice of cheese and put it in aluminum foil. I then repeated this process with the other egg and another two pieces of bread.

I left the apartment, brought the food with me and drove to work. It took about 20 minutes to drive there. I drove West on El Cajon Blvd., which eventually turned into Normal St., which then quickly turned into Washington St. I would come to the intersection at 4th Ave., where there was a stop light. Most of the time, I had to stop.

Everyday on the southwest corner of the intersection, I would see a man on a bicycle. In my head, I called him "Bike Boy." (I found out later Bike Boy was waiting for a cycling partner to arrive.) This was usually around 4:40am. While I always came to a full stop at the light, I didn't like having to wait for the light to turn green, so I would slowly proceed through the intersection. But I swear, Bike Boy would leer at me when I did that. I don't know that he did, but it always seemed like he was turning his head in my direction every time I illegally drove through the light. However, he never shouted anything at me, so he may not have cared what I was doing.

A little further down 4th Ave., I would see a discolored Mazda make a turn from one of the side streets. This Mazda had a broken tail light. I saw this Mazda almost every single day and most of the time, I would see him turn in front of me.

Soon after that, I would arrive at the address for News Monitoring Services around 4:50am. I usually had to park on the side streets because it was almost all metered parking out in front. Sometimes, when I came to the front door, Bike Boy and his partner would come whizzing by on the street.

The first thing I had to do was rewind all the videotapes that had been recording the night before. After this was done, I had to load the tapes for the day so that they would begin recording at 5am for the local newscasts. Then, I would start monitoring the news from the night before. Almost every day for the first nine months of the year, the lead story was typically what happened in the OJ Simpson trial. Yes, it was like watching Punxsutawney Phil being removed from his cage every day.

But every day, there was something different in the news that kept me from going insane. And my nights were always different because I found I could go out and experience free music performances by local artists, many of whom I became friendly with. I felt like I was making up for a lot of wasted time watching TV in my teens and 20s.

Looking back, I wonder if Bike Boy or the Mazda driver felt like they were stuck in a daily routine like I was. Or maybe they didn't even consider it because they were busy with their own issues. I just know that I noticed.

But something did come along to smash that routine to pieces. I'll start on that Monday.