This week has been catastrophic at the television channel where I work because the bosses told us that no one will work or get paid in the month of December and consequently the television station will show repeats at all times. The news has fallen like ice water on the back because, without being paid in December, a month when families spend more for the end-of-year holidays, many employees will be in financial trouble and will barely be able to make ends meet. But the most serious thing is that, as the channel operates at a loss, and will close for an entire month, and will repeat its programming with the consequent drop in audience at all hours, many of us fear that the closure of the television station will not be temporary, but definitive. The blame for this catastrophe does not lie with the bosses or the employees or the dubious talents who appear on camera. We all do our best to make the channel survive. The problem is that the public, who twenty years ago, when the channel was founded with a million-dollar investment, accompanied us with enthusiasm, has gone elsewhere. Have you migrated to watching other channels? Have you deserted our station because you prefer to watch other free-to-air television stations? No. The public has stopped watching open television in general. People under fifty hardly watch television anymore. They are all watching entertainment platforms, with their series and movies, as well as social networks, which offer pure entertainment in short narcotic, addictive capsules. The public has not stopped evading reality to consume different forms of entertainment. Those who previously watched us on television now prefer to watch Netflix and Amazon, Disney and Hulu, YouTube and TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. The world has changed, technology has reinvented itself, the public has moved to those sources of entertainment that, apparently, best serve their curiosity and expectations. On our television channel we cannot compete with those platforms. It’s a fight between a tiger and a monkey (and the monkey’s hands are tied). We are lost. People don’t even turn on the TV to watch the news or sports anymore. Everything is seen on the mobile phone, on the tablet, on the computer. It is there where the public, the sponsors and the big money have migrated. That’s why the channel I work on barely survives. We can’t beat TikTok. The tiger is pawing at the monkey. I am the badly injured monkey, about to die. I wonder then if in January I will return to the nightly program, or if the bosses will tell me that the channel will remain closed and it would be better not to return. I am resigned to the worst case scenario. It is not fair that the owners lose, while the employees win. It is true that we earn less and less. I now earn a third of what I earned almost twenty years ago, when the channel was inaugurated and they gave me a primetime program. It’s only a matter of time before the channel closes, or I get fired, or I quit. These days of November, knowing that I will not work in December, I have often asked myself if I should resign before the end of the year, in an act of minimal dignity. My wife advises me not to resign. Continue until the end, he tells me. I tell him that certain nights, driving my black truck, stuck in the infernal traffic of the highways, stuck in the hateful vehicular chaos, I think that I should quit right now, because losing an hour and a half to get from my house to the canal is a very great suffering, torture, and then speak for an hour live, knowing that very few people are watching me, is a sad and perhaps humiliating agony, the decline of the charlatan without an audience. It’s a very unequal exchange, I tell my wife. The cost exceeds the benefit, I tell you, complaining, I always complain, because the economic benefit I obtain does not compensate for the cost of the unhappiness that I must bear. But she tells me, hold on a little longer, it’s good for you to watch television, the work routine suits you, and, besides, if you quit out of sheer laziness, who’s going to feed the channel’s cats? What? brings me to the question that worries me most right now: if I don’t go to the channel for six consecutive weeks (the last week of November for Thanksgiving, the fourth week of December, and the first week of January), who will feed the children? channel cats, my channel cats? There are five cats, all of course smarter than me, and they wait for me punctually around seven at night and then at midnight when I leave the television station. I am so worried about those cats, my cats, that I have asked a canal employee, who lives near the station, to go every afternoon to feed them, in exchange for money that I will pay her. For now, then, I won’t give up. It is historically proven that I am a coward, a faint-hearted person, and this latest catastrophe confirms it, if necessary. I don’t dare give up. I prefer to wait, with the meekness of the crestfallen employee, for them to fire me, for them to close the channel, for them to cut my salary so much that it is no longer worth the effort to drive my truck an hour and a half to the television station, located in the fifth hells, in a soulless neighborhood of factories, trucks and stray cats. I used to think that when that program ended on that television station where I will soon be twenty years old, exhausting the job of speaking in the face of a decreasing audience, I would not retire completely from open television and I would move for a season, let’s say a year, to the city where I was born, the city of dust and fog, to host one last television program, that of my honorable retirement, in the smell of a crowd, there where it all began more than forty years ago, when he was a stiff, stiff young man, in a suit and tie, who said far-fetched words that few knew. Now I don’t see it that way. If the channel closes completely next year, or if it doesn’t close but shuts me up and fires me unceremoniously, or if I get tired of wasting time on the highways and finally quit the television station, then I won’t succumb to the corny temptation to move to the city where I was born to retire with scandal from public life, or at least from televised life, and I will stay calm in this house, on this island, without making any big maudlin, melodramatic announcements, already retired from decadent job of figurehead or extra or waning figure, and dedicated to two jobs that I hope to continue exercising, when television is just a memory that fades, fades and fades: the job of writing lies that seem like truths, that is, novels, and the job of speaking lies that seem like truths, that is, homemade videos for my personal YouTube channel, which will soon have a million subscribers and can now also be heard on Spotify. That’s how it is, and how the channel I work on has made me given away the entire month of December without working or getting paid, I have resolved that that month I will not travel anywhere and I will lock myself up to write like a madman, without answering the phone, without answering anyone, listening only to the wayward voices that speak in my head, trying to finish a novel about some bad-hearted bastards, a fiction that I have been maligning for years and I plan to title “Bad-hearted bastards.” I will do my best to finish it on the last day of December and then I will surely think that the best thing that could happen to me at the end of this year is for the bosses to tell me not to come to the channel for the entire month of December, it would be better to stay home.
#Bad #bastards
