Twenty in NoJoMo 2016

Kind of a nadir in my motivation today. Yesterday, I apologized to the wall for hitting it; Friday’s infusion can’t get here fast enough.

Thankfully, I think I’m free of medical adventures this week, otherwise.

So, onto the prompt.

What did you want to be when you grew up? What are you, actually?

What did I want to be? You know, I don’t really know. There were several things. Obviously, a star in whatever sport was in season. (Except for, maybe, hockey, which I never could really get into.)

My dad was a soldier, so the military always had allure.

As a kid in the 90s, the space program was also something I paid a lot of attention to. The idea of space shuttles making regular trips to…yeah, I could do that. Until that cold day in 1986. (All the teachers had been watching in the smoking/teachers’ lounge while we were at lunch....after the accident, they gathered all of the classes of my grade into a single classroom and told us through tears, as that’d been the mission with the teacher aboard.)

But it wasn’t too long before I caught the radio bug. From listening to Royals’ gams on my He-Man AM radio in Kansas to listening to stuff on AFRTS/AFN out of Stuttgart (certainly the first place I was Rick-rolled.)

When we came back to the States, my dad was stationed at the Pentagon, so I was immersed in late-80s/early-90s DC zookeepers. Don & Mike. The Greaseman, who’d replaced Howard Stern, etc.

After another stint in Germany, and a year in exile in South Central PA, I started to seriously consider doing it for a living.

I didn’t have a great voice.
I didn’t speak terribly clearly.

I thought I could figure it out, though.

I took telecommunications classes in high school, where I did a bit of voiceover work for TV. Again, it wasn’t really my forte, but it was something I enjoyed.

I won an Air Force ROTC scholarship in high school.

I ended up not accepting the scholarship. Not only did I have concerns about being able to meet the physical requirements, I’d failed the uncorrected vision test during my physical. At the time (and it may still be true), if you couldn’t test 20/20, you couldn’t fly. So, no chance of even doing something like driving a C-130, ala Rick Perry.

I would be doing something on the ground. That didn’t sound too interesting.

Furthermore, I wouldn’t have been able to choose my own major. I was provided a list of majors, told to rank my top five, then they would tell me what I would be.

There was also the issue of finding a school with Air Force ROTC. I really only had the option of schools in Mississippi. My dad was on active duty, and a Texas resident. I had a Mississippi driver’s license. I was downloaded in Florida, so I was looking at Florida State.

I think Mississippi State was the only school that had both the engineering programs I would have had to choose. I wasn’t enthused by Starkville. (Though it was better than the promise of disownership my parents gave had I chosen Ole Miss....) Nor was I enthused by the other part of the deal with the Air Force scholarship. I would be on call as a reserve enlisted Airman for the time I was in college. After I finished, I’d be on active duty for at least four years, but they could choose to make me stay on active duty for eight.

The prospect of devoting, potentially, the next twelve years of my life to the Air Force without being able to fly didn’t sound at all like something I wanted to do. One of my high school football coaches had played at the Air Force Academy. I really didn’t envy him running the weather detachment at a remote Army Airfield.

What sealed the deal was FSU’s determination that I wouldn’t qualify for in-state tuition.

On my dad’s urging, I applied at Christopher Newport University. I enrolled in Army ROTC, which didn’t have the same sort of reserve requirements, and only a two-year commitment following graduation.

The ROTC situation at CNU was strange. We were cross-enrolled at William & Mary. While our classes were at CNU for the first two years, the third year was split between CNU and W&M. The fourth year was pretty much all at W&M.

Whatever. It was cheaper for me to go to CNU as an in-state student without a scholarship than it would have been for me to go to FSU on scholarship.

I tried hard to make sure I won an Army scholarship. Of the about 70 of those of us in the CNU first and second year programs, I think only one eventually got a scholarship and was commissioned. A friend ended up dropping out of school, and enlisting in the Army. He went to warrant officers’ school, and won the distinguished flying cross in Iraq.

After my first year, though, I was behind. I was having trouble meeting the physical requirements. I could run an awful long way, just not very quickly. I was fine on sit-ups, but iffy on push-ups.

I got along with the instructor my first year. The second year, notsomuch. Between her, and the W&M product LTC who wasn’t going to make COL, and was serving out his time so he could retire with more money, I judged my prospects of a scholarship as pretty low.

I dropped out of ROTC. The steady sting of Bs in ROTC was bringing down my GPA, anyway.

I got a job at the Go-Kart track at the post my dad used to command. The following summer, I got a job doing Master Control at a local UHF TV group. The work wasn’t terribly exciting, but it paid my meager bills. Even though the shifts were long, after I’d done the prep programming (tape sequencer) for the shift, I was basically just there monitoring things for the rest of the shift. That gave me time to read, and do a bit of writing on my school assignments.

It wasn’t a bad few months, really. I could have seen myself working there for a long time. I’d scheduled my classes so that I could be in class during the day, and tending the station nights and weekends. I did some camera work for, of all things, women’s fast pitch softball.

Then the cable merger came (courtesy the Communications Act of 1996). One of the big cable companies had bought up a bunch of smaller local cable companies. Because of that, the stations were not powerful-enough to meet must-carry requirements throughout the area. While the station had something like 85% market coverage, it was on three different frequencies over the air. Wanting another cable channel, the big company decided to pull the local station. I, along with everyone else, got laid off.

During my final two weeks, I decided to go check in on Tony Macrini, who was doing a promotion somewhat close to home. I told him what was going on, and he told me to send him a resume, and a tape.

Shortly thereafter, I got a call from Dave Morgan to set up an interview.

I went down for an interview.

Since I didn’t have a tape to send, he picked up a piece of paper from his desk, and told me to read it. It was Art Bell’s resignation address.

You can read. You’ve got a good voice. We pay seven buck an hour.
Okay.
So, you have a wife and kids?
No.
Ah, so a single guy. You have another gig; this isn’t many hours.
Yeah, I’m a college student.
Wait a minute. How old are you?
Nineteen.

I was working Friday and Saturday nights. I had something like two breaks an hour, and could read/write the rest of the time.

Within the next year, I was working six days per week. Not a ton of airtime doing live assist work, but I did get to do things like write local news and weather forecasts.

I also took on repairing some of the broken IT stuff around. That wheezing 286 running the AP wire? Yeah, I can fix that.

After I graduated, I eventually was moved to doing mostly iT work. When I left seven years after I started, I was only on the air maybe two hours per week. The rest of my time, I was dealing with broken PCs for the rest of the staff.

In 2005, I started doing real government engineering work. I’ve been doing specifically IT work since late 2007.

Could I elaborate a lot more? Absolutely. Am I going to stop now? Yep.

Two-thirds of the way through.