Everyone who works on Jeopardy! knows that I am early for everything. If there is a meeting at eight in the morning, I’m there from ten until eight. If I’m not where I need to be ten minutes early, I consider myself late. It is a sign of respect for the job—that you want to do it well and not leave anything to chance.
I learned the importance of punctuality in grade eight, when my dad got me a summer job as a bellhop at the Nickel Range Hotel, where an average tip was ten cents and a big tip was twenty-five cents. The weekend before my first day of work, we had a class trip to celebrate the end of the school year. We traveled from Sudbury to Ottawa to Montreal to Quebec City, then back to Sudbury. I didn’t get much sleep those three days, and mostly it was on the bus. So I came home that Sunday night and went straight to bed. The next morning, I woke up and it was eleven. I was three hours late for my first shift at the hotel.
Mr. Rouleau—the owner of the hotel and father of my friend Maurice—went to my dad and said, “George, Sonny is not here. He was due for work at eight o’clock.” So the phone call came from Dad, and I rushed down to work. That day I vowed I’d never be late to a job ever again.
Here’s an example of how seriously I took this vow. When I first started for the CBC in Toronto, in addition to my weekly job hosting Music Hop, I signed on to the radio station at 5:00 a.m. and hosted a morning show until 9:00 a.m. I was younger then. I figured if I took a short afternoon nap, I could go see movies and plays and concerts in the evening, then as long as I got to bed by 1:00 a.m. I’d be okay to get up at 4:15 a.m. and ready for the sign-on, where I would review those events. And, since I lived three blocks from the station, it was a quick commute.
Just in case, the producer had me record a safety tape that would cover the first half hour. There was some music and me doing some generic vamping: “Welcome to a new day here at CBC.” If I didn’t show up, the engineer would put on the tape and call me, then I’d rush over and pick up off the tape.
“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, remembering the lesson I’d learned at the Nickel Range Hotel. “I’m never going to be late. I’ll always get up.”
The producers and the crew members weren’t so confident. They started a pool as to how long it’d be before I overslept.
I started the show in September, and sure enough, in mid-November I woke up at three minutes after five.
“Holy shit!” I said. I jumped out of bed. “That’s it! I’m going to lose the bet!”
I quickly got dressed, and I realized the engineer hadn’t called me. I flipped on the radio, but the safety tape wasn’t playing.
“Why aren’t they playing the tape?” I said. “That’s the reason we did it. It was supposed to cover me!”
I ran like mad those three blocks to the station. As I’m running up the stairs to go into the building, I glanced behind me.
Jeez, I thought, there’s a lot of traffic for five o’clock in the morning.
Just then, another CBC staff member was walking out.
“Hi, Alex,” he said. “You working tonight?”
“What?” I said. Only then did I realize what happened. This was during winter, when it gets dark early in Toronto. I had taken a nap in the afternoon. It was 5:00 p.m. I was embarrassed as all hell. But I was not late for work.
While my colleagues at Jeopardy! have all come to appreciate and adopt my insistence on punctuality, at home it’s a different story. Dealing with family who are not of this same belief can drive you crazy. I’ll tell them, “We’re leaving at five.” Which to me means ten minutes to five. But they take it literally.
“You said we’re leaving at five! You didn’t say be ten minutes early!”
I’ve done a lot of sitting and waiting in cars for my wife and children.