Getting it covered

Applied for a job today. Community manager at Turn 10 studios - the people who brought us the Forza Motorsport series. A snowball thrown upon the river Styx has a better chance for survival than I have of getting this job, but I tried it, anyway. I figured a good cover letter might serve me better than the resume alone and knew just the anecdote to start it off. As I was writing it, I got thinking how I had never shared this story with the folks at 2old2play. So here it is:

 

 

Way back in the day, when I was a reporter for a local weekly paper, I needed to keep abreast of all issues. National and provincial politics were as important and far-reaching as the local council meetings I had to attend regularly. So to keep up-to-date, I read two daily newspapers every day before reporting to the office for work.

I would buy these papers and then order a coffee at the local coffee shop. The Toronto Star has a more liberal viewpoint and heavily covers national and provincial affairs. The Globe and Mail does this as well, but is a more conservative newspaper and balances out views from The Star. But, as you could imagine, reading as much out of both papers as possible is a long and drawn-out affair. So I would drop a few quarters in the coffee shop's video games between papers.
 

Then somebody ratted me out to my publisher. Yup. I was a bad boy. "Do you really think that having our reporter play video games every morning sets a good image of our paper?" I told her about them being a growing form of entertainment, but this was the late 80s and into the early 90s. Most people still thought of Pac Man and Donkey Kong. Adults did not play video games. They were for children. I was ordered to stop this practice immediately.

I said I would not

"Do you mean to tell me that if I order you to stop, you're going to keep doing it anyway?"

"What I do in the mornings before work is done on my time," I told her. I remember the exchange like it was yesterday. "What I do on my time 

 is my business."

Well, that was the beginning of the end of my journalistic career. Over the next year it became impossible for me to do anything right in her eyes. We fought many times over ways to cover and present news stories until I could take it no more. I walked away from the newspaper and from journalism in general. My education and the previous five years of my life were wasted. I started driving taxi instead.

So yes, I'm a writer with a journalistic background. I'm also a video gamer and I love cars in general. Not included in my resume is a brief stint as track photographer at Brighton Speedway to assist the owner when his other photographer quit. Further to that, I know Forza - or at least since I dumped Grand Turismo's ass and took up FM2. So far in FM3 I have 10,645 miles and 118 hours under my belt since I got my replacement Xbox 360 at Christmas. (My old one finally breathed its last just two days before release date. I had my LCE and nothing to play it on)
So to wrap things up, not only would it be great to work for the team who produced my favorite game, but also to shove in my old publisher's nose that I am still playing video games and earning a living from it.
I thank you for your attention.