Girl Talk - Column

It is a sweet moment when you are fully conscious that a dream is right on the brink of coming true. It was 7.30 on a Monday morning in late February 2000, I had brushed my teeth, my game face was on and my very first suit was hanging from the bedroom door of my grungy student flat in St Albans, Christchurch.
After a lifetime of hope and hard work, my journalism career was about to be launched with a plum graduate role as cub reporter for popular local news station CTV.
Walking through the doors of the TV station that morning, I was overwhelmed with nerves and awe. Scores of busy bodies bustled about the place in top gear, everyone knowing exactly what they were doing it, and getting it done by yesterday.
Everyone except me.
Brimming with equal parts enthusiasm and ignorance, I was handed a story and a camera crew and told by the gruff but (eventually) loveable news producer to get on with it. The trainer wheels were gone.
After days, weeks and then months, my status as new kid on the CTV block diminished and shy respect for more senior staff was replaced by a sense of kinship and my first taste of professional collegiality.
With one part NZ On Air funding to two parts passion, the crew at CTV put out a daily news bulletin and a host of other live and local telly that on good days knocked the socks off anything the big boys at TV One and Three could offer.
On bad days when Christchurch was ticking over quietly we had fun seeing how far you could stitch the latest "cat stuck up tree" story for maximum dramatic effect.
After four years of expensive tertiary education and beating off scores of other applicants, I found myself being paid below minimum wage in a workplace that was so frantically busy I used to run down the corridors and resist going to the bathroom all day in a bid to buy myself a few more precious seconds.
Like everyone in the building, I was under-paid, over-worked - and insanely in love with every minute of it.
The CTV crew were made up of two distinct breeds; young blood like me, desperate for an exclusive story to catch the eye of a network producer and earn us our ticket out of local TV, and the old guard who had been there, done that, and lived through enough breaking news stories to keep the rest of us grounded when the pace got a little too frantic.
At CTV, I grew up.
I learned that ideals and ethics acquired at journalism school seldom applied in the workplace, and that, when the chips were down, colleagues can make amazing friends.
This morning I saw some of those friends on the front page of the paper - a line up of mugshots, a tribute to the lost.
Faces that haven't been seen for years but that once, thanks to long hours spent editing stories together, were more familiar to me than my own. Gone.
And other faces that were unfamiliar, but whose stories, cut short, were probably just like mine.
Fresh-faced graduates high on life, hearts thumping with the adrenalin that comes from doing what you really, really love for the very first time.
On any other day it would and should be those faces bringing us the story. It is a surreal and heartbreaking reality check to see that instead they have become it.