Centrepiece Online | Winter 2000

On the Run

by Bren Landon ’01

“Whoa! Slow down. What’s the rush?” a Secret Service man joked with me as I sped through the Norton Center lobby. “I can’t. I have a job to do!” It really wasn’t required of me to go the pace I was going, but I was so excited I couldn’t slow down. Only a few hours earlier I had been asked to be an Associated Press runner for the vice presidential debate (and I took the job title literally).

I didn’t think that I was going to get a seat in the debate hall so I tried to make myself feel better by saying I would have a more exciting time in the media hall. I pleasantly found out that I had been kidding myself. It ended up that I had the best seat in the house. Well, okay, I didn’t exactly get a seat, but I got to stand in the lower level of the Norton Center only a few feet away from the Cheney and Lieberman families, Sen. John Glenn, and a host of other important people who get to go up and hug the candidates when they are finished debating.

I was assigned to stand by an AP photographer and take his finished pictures (which were on computer disks) to an AP editor on the top floor of the Norton Center. This editor upstairs was on a computer choosing the pictures to use and sending them out over the wire while the debate was going on. I joked with my friends that the AP photos they would see in newspapers across the world would be brought to everyone courtesy of me. It really did kind of baffle me that my little job was part of a huge process of getting information out to people all around the world.

From the debate I learned that grunt work does pay off. I got a real workout running photos up and down five flights of stairs, but with my adrenaline rush I could have gone all night. Not only did I get to see the debate up close and personal, but I also got to see all of the behind-the-scenes excitement.

After the debate, I realized that my job was so miniscule that anyone could have done it, or even no one, and everything still would have gone fine. But the AP man I worked for thanked me profusely saying I made his job so much easier. And when we started hearing feedback from around the nation about the exceptional job Centre had done hosting the debate, I got the feeling that it was those seemingly miniscule things that Centre workers and volunteers did that made the difference. My little bit of help might have played a part in making the debate so successful, and even if it didn’t, it was worth it to make friends with the Secret Service man in the lobby.