Dive in movie

What a day it has been. I think I had three days worth of activity happen again to me. I love days like today. I had to get into the office and do a music mix of the Port video, burn the DVD and get it off to the client before 10:30. That’s always interesting when you are dealing with deadlines. After that I had my meeting with the head of Bahrain Radio and Television. We just really clicked. He liked the concept of our show, but not necessarily the production value. I absolutely agreed with him. We only set it up so he could look at the concept. He liked it very much. So now we have to figure out how we can work together. Im supposed to give him several proposals. So the meeting went very very well. On my way out, I told him that he has thousands of hours of footage, he should turn them into something. So we are also going to figure out how we can make not only Bahraini documentaries out of the programs, but Middle Eastern programs as well. That broadens our market. It will be interesting how this plays out. Bahrain TV doesn’t have a lot of money. But we’ll see how creative we can get. The good thing is that each of us wants to work together.

Something happened that was really bizarre when I got back. We put an ad out in the paper for our new sales manager today. I got a call from a guy in London. This guy, I’ve only emailed a few times never spoke on the phone to him. So he called me up from London. He said, Rick, Im reading your blog on Aug. 31, where you fired your sales manager. Does this mean you are in the market for a sales manager? I was blown away. How did this guy find my blog, read it, and let alone try to meet a need I had for it. This guy is in placement. So he’s sending me some resumes of some of his clients. I so hope I can hire one of them, just because he did so much legwork.

My friend called me up and offered me two passes to the Lost Island of Dilmun waterpark. This is a huge and beautiful waterpark, one of the biggest in the Middle East. They were having a dive-in movie, where a movie was projected over the wave pool. It was amazingly cool to watch an entire movie in an innertube. The person I was originally supposed to go with, couldn’t go at the last minute. So I went down my list of friends. I got about 7 deep in my friend list, and no one could go. I know it was last minute. But I was afraid I was going to have to go by myself. Even though it was such a great day, I was starting to feel sorry for myself. I felt alone. If I had a girlfriend/wife this totally wouldn’t be an issue. Or even if I had my boys with me, it wouldn’t be an issue there either. So finally kind of as a last ditch effort, I invited my new American friend Ivan. Ivan is working with the American embassy. I can see why everyone was busy tonight. I think Ivan and I were supposed to go together. It turns out he’s a Christian. He even went to an Assembly of God church in Fremont. No not that one, another one. We had some really interesting discussions about faith and culture. It was nice getting to know a new friend.

In between it all, I also had an interview video shoot in the afternoon. This girl was really nervous. I just had such a hard time calming her down. Normally in English, I have techniques I use to calm down people. But her Arabic made all my techniques for naught, so I had to improvise. I just tried to use my body language to calm her down. She eventually got through it, but she was so nervous.

So all in all…a very good day for me.