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Jake chuckles and looks at me this time.
Shrugging, I add, “I’m not much of a night person.”
“Not a night person. Not a drinker. But here you are.”
“I think we covered the reason for that.” Afraid he’ll somehow turn the subject, I answer his original question. “I do video editing for social media influencers and families who do video blogging.”
“Like for YouTube?”
“And TikTok, Instagram... Facebook.”
He dumps what remains in the glass—coins—in the envelope. “That sounds interesting.”
“It’s fun. Pays the bills.” I’ve never been insecure about what I do for work, but I suddenly worry it’s not a good enough job.
I mean, I get paid well.
Both of my family content creators pay my standard $30 an hour rate, with additional pay when I break down a twenty-minute video into two or three shorts for YouTube, or pieces that can be published on TikTok or Instagram and Facebook.
I’m usually given an entire day’s worth of content to go through and edit, sometimes as many as eighteen hours of footage to trim down into a more digestible, twenty-minute piece.
There’s an art to editing content, too. You can’t just give little pieces of a day and push it together, calling it a video.
You have to tell a story.
There has to be something in the family’s day that will keep a viewer watching until the end.
Thankfully, neither family has chosen an immediate turn around, where they film one day and post it the next. One works on a three day schedule—I’ll get Monday’s content late Monday night, edit it on Tuesday with wiggle room into Wednesday, for them to post on Thursday. That family also only posts three times a week, on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
My other family is a full week ahead in their content schedule, but they post Monday through Saturday. Monday’s footage will be posted the following Monday.
My busiest days are the ones where I have both families to edit, but because they’ve been posting on the same schedules for the entire two years I’ve worked with them, I have my process down pat.
It also helps that they’re both really good about telling me if there’s a specific event they want highlighted in their video, which gives me a game plan before I even open the files.
“Any divas?” Jake teases, ripping off the piece of paper that kept the bag from sealing on itself.
“No. I have really great clients.”
This time when Jake walks toward me, he reaches for a panel and turns off the lights in the pub, leaving the front of house blanketed in black. Even the neon signs in the window go dark.
“We’ll leave out the back door,” he explains. “You can follow me. Just need to drop this in the safe.”
Walking behind him, I take in more of the kitchen that I wasn’t able to see from my stance before. Around the corner is where the office is, and there’s another open area where metal shelves hold paper goods and shelf stable cans.
When he steps into the office, I stay just outside the doorway.
“Finished,” he tells Saint, walking to an under desk safe beside the other man. Jake opens a drawer in the top, places the clear envelope inside, then pushes the drawer closed, open, then closed again. In between the heavy sounds of the drawer, I heard as the coins in the envelope hit the bottom of the safe after the first push in.
Saint finger-pecks into the laptop keyboard before closing the screen. “We’re good here too. I’ll go set the alarm.”
Jake and I move to one of the two doors in the back as Saint jogs to the front, then jogs back toward us. “Set.”
It’s only then that Jake opens the back door, holding it open for both me and Saint, who hits another set of lights, dousing the back of house in near darkness—all but for the soft glow of a single light in the middle of the room. Once everyone’s out, Saint locks the door.
Out on the back stoop, I notice another door immediately to the pub’s right. “Does that door go with the second door inside?” I ask, curious.
“There’s an apartment upstairs. Usually Rory and Emily use it when they’re in town,” Saint explains.
