Al said:
I've been an engineer for 25 years. Many of my colleagues have lacked
much in the way of a normal sense of humor. Non-engineers seem to rate
us as second place for being strange, overly literal, and humorless.
Accountants take first place.
Al, the uninformed just don't get our humor, even if we try to
explain it to them. I was an engineer at an AFRTS TV station at Ft
Greely in the '70s. I had a problem with a couple of the talking heads
on our live newscast. They wouldn't stay in their seats, or even on set
during actualities, so I rewired their off air monitor. The next
newscast they got up and were shadow boxing in front of the news desk
when the sound went dead, and they thought that they were on air, in
their dress uniform jackets, and underwear. (No air conditioning at the
station). Needless to say, they freaked out! The next time they got
out of line was a Saturday noon newscast, where a fishing program from a
station in Fairbanks was on their off air monitors.
My best pranks at the station? One of the staff was a drunk and he
was always bragging that he was too smart to get caught. The late night
DJ had relatives that worked at a NOAA weather station nearby, and a lot
of nights they would bring him supper. They had brought the bottle with
the food, and it might have had a quarter of a cup. I was going to make
a bank out of the bottle, but I couldn't carry it back to the barracks
that night, so I hid the empty wine bottle inside the console, behind a
rack mount CCU power supply. The station manager found it, and raised
bloody hell. The guy drank so much that he truly couldn't remember if
it was his bottle, so I just stood back and enjoyed the floor show.
before it was over, he admitted to drinking on duty, and apologized for
leaving the empty bottle. The manager pulled him from engineering
rotation, then put him on day shift in the film library.
Another time we had a general from the Pentagon visiting the base. He
called the station and didn't identify himself. He ordered me to run
something else, because he had seen the movie the week before, in DC. I
replied, Sorry sir, but I haven't seen it, and hung up. He called right
back, and started yelling that he was a general, and that if I didn't
obey his order, he was calling my commanding general. I laughed and
said, "Tell him that Michael said 'Hello'." He snarled "What the hell
does that mean?" I laughed and told him, "My General will explain it to
you, if you're stupid enough to call him". He proceeded to brag about
all his friends in DC, so I reminded him that he wasn't in DC, but at
the US Army cold weather test site, 105 miles from the nearest real
town. Then I told him all the places that I had friends. He grumbled,
"One damn phone call and I'm out of here!" I asked him how he would
find a working outside phone line, or mail a letter if word spread that
he was trying to disrupt our only entertainment. Then I twisted the
knife a little more and said, In fact, if you piss off the wrong people,
they will lose your orders, and report you as AWOL and last seen heading
for the Bering Straits, and Russia. Your Pentagon friends wouldn't help
you if they think you're a commie, will they? He never called back.
Was it something I said? ;-)
My all time favorite was running a station ID in color, on a B&W only
'60 RCA and Gates plant. The Base Information Officer was telling
everyone that the station could not be converted to color. I don't know
about you, but I have never let the 'unwashed' tell me what I CAN'T do.
I borrowed a Heathkit color bar generator, made a custom 35 mm ID slide
with parts from the slide repair kit, and dry transfer lettering from
the leftover bin in the newspaper office. I used the very basic video
keyer in the '60 vintage RCA video switcher to invert the video from the
film chain to display:
AFRTS
CH8
in bold colors on a black background. Boy, did the excrement hit the
rotary oscillator! The shit hit the fan, too! ;-)
Five seconds later, the control room's private phone line was
ringing. The base information officer was screaming, "Soldier, you've
just made a fool of me!" I replied, "But Sir!, You've always bragged of
being a self made man!". He never spoke to me again, or bothered
anything in the radio or TV station. I know he called my commanding
general, and was told to leave me alone, and stay out of the transmitter
and control room, for his own good.
I had an ongoing problem with the base power plant. They
intentionally caused brownouts, and used us as a power dump. I was less
than five minutes into the first of three reels of kinescope of the '74
world series when my line voltage dropped from 120 VAC to 25 VAC, shot
up over 210 VAC (the upper limit of the AC line meter), and was tripping
circuit breakers all over the complex. That was the final straw! After
I picked up all the pieces of shredded film, I had one of the DJs cut a
custom 30 second cart with "AFRTS CH8 will return to the air as soon as
the AC power problems are resolved. If you have any questions call:
XXX-XXXX" The phone number was an unlisted line into the power plat
manager's office. He got several *hundred* phone calls, and I never saw
the line voltage vary more than 5 volts after that. ;-)
In spite of all this, I had turned a station that could barely sign
on each day, into one that ran over seven months without an on air
failure. I made E4 at around 20 months and received a letter of
commendation from my commanding General.
A few weeks after I left that station, the two chief engineers from
the Fairbanks TV stations paid a visit to "Help out the poor dumb GIs at
that crappy little military TV station" They were pissed off at how
well the station was running, and admitted to the other engineer that it
was in better shape that either of their stations. My friend Neeley "The
Hoop" asked them, "Do you remember the soldier that you refused to give
the nickel tour of your stations"? He did all the work.
--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.
Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida
