In the middle of my senior year of high school I hadn't really decided what I wanted to do with my life. I remember my guidance counselor asking me what my plans were for after graduation and not being able to think of anything concrete. I liked music and little else. I harbored no illusions of ever becoming a successful muscian, so I came up with the only alternative that I could think of: "I want to be an audio engineer," I said.
It wasn't really the first time that I had thought of that career path; just the first time that I had vocalized it. I had owned a 4-track recorder for awhile, was recording my own music (sort of a white suburban teenager's version of funk music), and enjoyed the process of capturing sound on tape. I took note of the engineer credit on some of my favorite records, and realized that the engineer was an important part of the whole creative process.
Two Years later I graduated from Five Towns College on Long Island with my Associate Degree in Audio Recording Technology. Unfortunately a few things stood in the way of me and my complete dominance in the field. My first obstacle was a lack of talent. Please don't take this to mean that I was no good at what I did; I just realized that in a field as competitive as audio recording I didn't have what it takes to make a name for myself. The second obstacle was purely financial. Most engineers at the time had to first work as an assistant at a studio. I simply could not afford to spend 20 plus hours a day getting coffee for people and sweeping the floors, while making absolutely no money.
Good for me then that by the end of my college days I had realized that I was qualified to do a lot more with my degree. I had an entry level understanding of electronics and had been educated in the basics of live sound, so the medium of radio seemed like a good fit.
A few months later while standing in the pouring rain watching the station's broadcast van sink up to its wheels in mud, I wondered if my dreams of a career in radio were sinking with it...
To Be Concluded
To part 3
3 comments:
To be continued? To be concluded? Man I love this! It is like Back To The Future, except no one has called you chicken in this story.
Try to work that into part three. And set it in the old west.
Just wait, Sweetie. In six months I am going to re-post part 1 as Episode 4, and promise a series of prequels and a series of sequels as well. At some point in the future, I will also introduce "Special Editions" of each post that will include new and enhanced words that were previously impossible to include.
Don't forget to change Jeff into an incompetent boob in your re-write.
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