Anxiety as an Ally: How I Turned a Worried Mind into My Best Friend by Dan Ryckert

Author:Dan Ryckert [Ryckert, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Up To Something Publishing
Published: 2015-03-14T23:00:00+00:00

One thing that I did find time to do was make a dumb decision that would dump months of wholly avoidable anxiety on my head. When I had started at the sports station, a producer pulled me into an edit room and said “you’ve gotta watch this.” He proceeded to show me a three-minute clip of baseball legend George Brett as he was miked up for a spring training segment for our station. Knowing full well that he had a microphone on his shirt, he followed young Kansas City Royals around the diamond while regaling them with stories about how often he craps his pants (“I’m good twice a year for that,” he says proudly). I couldn’t stop laughing at the absurdity of this sports legend boasting about crapping his pants at the Bellagio after eating a bunch of crab legs, and the producer gave me a DVD copy of the clip.

Once I had left the TV station for Garmin, I determined that it was my comedic duty to expose the internet to this gem. I uploaded it to YouTube, and it tallied up millions of hits overnight. Every major sports blog in the country was writing about it and linking to it, and even non-sports websites were putting it on their front page. I knew that the clip would draw some attention, but I assumed that it would mostly come from the Kansas City sports crowd. Instead, it was quickly passed around and featured nationwide.

Within a couple of days, the Kansas City Star featured a story about the infamous clip. They had interviewed representatives of the TV station that I had worked for, claiming that the video was “stolen from their vault” and that they’d be pursuing the maximum penalty allowed by law once they found out who leaked it. Considering that I assumed that the video would become a local joke at most, I started worrying when I saw it pop up in the papers with quotes like that.

Things escalated thanks to several updates in the Kansas City Star, and I’d get a ton of phone calls whenever my friends saw the stories (“Hey man, they’re saying that they have a good idea of who did it. Are you worried?”). At its peak, TMZ ran highlights of the clip on their national television show and featured a segment where its correspondents talked about the “manhunt” for whoever “stole the clip from the Time Warner vault.”

Even though I hadn’t stolen anything, I was really starting to panic about what kind of penalty I’d face when or if they found out it was me. I started contacting lawyers so that I could get a better understanding of what to expect. Every morning, I’d look at my phone and dread seeing that I had numerous missed calls or text messages. One of those mornings, I stepped outside to see an overnight FedEx package on my front step. It was from an executive at Time Warner, and the letter informed me that they were aware that I leaked the video.

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