When I first walked into FOX News Channel’s Los Angeles bureau, I didn’t know a white balance from white rice, a microwave truck from a microwave oven, and when editors said they were “crashing” I thought it was in reference to a sugar low.

But over the course of four years at FOX, I have not only increased my vocabulary with a glossary of terms from the television news industry — I have been given the opportunity to travel all over the country, and the world, producing news.

The Los Angeles bureau is my home base — but the enormity of the region it covers keeps all of us staffers regularly on the road. Ours is the “Western Region” — California, Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and, yes, Hawaii (but please save your snickering — I have produced two big stories there and have never had a moment to lie on a beach or sip a Mai Tai. As our Coordinating Producer, Don Fair, is fond of saying, Hawaii has so little TV news technology, it’s like producing in a third world country).

I have also traveled overseas on assignment, and it is this type of travel that always makes me marvel at how cool my job is. I have been to Colombia, where our crew hiked through a jungle filled with guerilla insurgents, only to come across multiple cocaine labs; I have tracked drug smugglers in Mexico; I have lived in Israel for a month; I have been tear-gassed in Venezuela. It’s not always glamorous, but it’s always interesting.

If you watch the news, you know the stories. What you don’t know are the stories behind the stories … and in the next few months, you won’t believe some of what you’re going to read.