My Career With the CBC
Some of us are born to obscurity and some have obscurity thrust upon them.
After rocketing through my B.A. in a mere 17 years, I began casting about for a job worthy of someone with my unique qualifications. The high demand for English majors coupled with the lucrative job market of 1988 made my options dizzying. But when I saw an ad for freelancers with CBC radio, I knew I had found my calling. I was a faithful CBC listener, a devotee of the legendary Peter Gzowski and Arthur Black.
Plus, I had media experience. I had, after all, been the South Porcupine correspondent for the Timmins Daily Press, for 30 cents a column inch on slow news days. The fact that my twelve-year-old daughter made more money delivering the paper than I did writing for it was a moot point. After all, hadn’t Gzowski got his start at the self-same paper? My future stardom was practically assured.
When I went in for the interview, the producer didn’t appear as impressed with my credentials as I was. She wore the pained expression of a teenager coerced into babysitting her kid sister while all her friends were at a party.
Reluctantly, she approved my first story idea and sent me on my way, tape recorder in hand. I returned proudly the next day with my half-hour interview on tape.
“Fine,” she said, nodding curtly. Let’s get it dubbed and take it to the editing room.”
My enthusiasm began to drain away, when she led me to a large machine that resembled a computer from the 60’s—the kind that take up half a room. Nobody had told me I would have to do my own editing. She clearly didn’t know who she was dealing with. In my family I am kindly known as a techno-idiot, unable to handle anything more complicated than a microwave.
It was my worst nightmare. Reels of tape were everywhere. Mountains of them. All piled on top of one another on my nemesis—the Editing Machine.
Dragon Lady grabbed an empty reel and threaded the dubbed tape onto the machine at warp speed. With a razor blade and editing tape she demonstrated how to edit without so much as nicking her dangerous-looking red lacquered nails.
“Now you do it,” she said.
I froze in panic. My mind was a whirl of tape and buttons. I couldn’t remember which reel my story was on. She made a visible effort to be patient.
“First, you need the takeup reel, right?”
I nodded intelligently, wondering what a takeup reel was. I was not off to a good start.
Eventually I was able to listen on the headset and begin to cut away the wasted footage myself. At one point I inserted a six-inch length of music from the “B” reel, but it didn’t sound quite right on the playback. I glanced over my shoulder. Dragon Lady had left the room.
“Quick!” I hissed at someone in the newsroom. “What’s wrong with this?”
He examined my reel and explained that I had inserted the musical piece backward. Like it’s so easy to tell one side of tape from another.
Dragon Lady and I laboured through the morning. I didn’t dare suggest stopping for lunch. She stood over me, tapping her granny-booted foot impatiently when she wasn’t called away to more pressing crises. Fortunately for me, she was called away to the phone just as I reached for the play button and hit reverse instead. My mind was in slow motion, but the machine wasn’t. I watched in horror as the reels spit two miles of tape onto the floor like a pile of Christmas ribbons.
I glanced around to see if she had noticed. She appeared to be deep in conversation, probably nailing some Salvation Army worker to the wall.
There is only one way to rewind two miles of jumbled tape onto an empty reel. By hand. It took me half an hour, during which time everyone in the newsroom looked the other way tactfully.
By six o’clock that evening (still no lunch) the tape was done. We went up to the sound booth where I read the script she had wearily handed me. Apart from the fact that she said I “had a voice like a funeral director,” that part was relatively painless.
After eight hours of labour that made childbirth seem like a picnic, we had reduced a half-hour interview to a five minute “package.” I was paid seventy-five dollar, with, no doubt, the Dragon Lady’s heartfelt wish that she never see or hear from me again.
She went on to bigger and better things with the CBC. I scrapped my dreams of becoming a media superstar and settled for the quieter life of a writer, where the technological challenges are limited to Windows 8. Which is struggle enough for me.
