Jobs

I joined Twitter near its inception sent a twit and another the other day I think. Same with Facebook, joined and then nothing. Getting to old I guess but the other day I went on Facebook and updated my account by listing most of the jobs I have had.

Interesting how many jobs you can have in 67 years, Worked in a Coke plant, the stuff they feed blast furnaces with to make iron and steel. Civil War vintage plant with a blacksmith's shop to make individual tools for workers like me. Most dangerous job I ever saw including those on TV today. Maybe with the exception of TV tower technicians. That is a dangerous job but at least it is not as filthy as a Coke plant.

And there was the job selling Paradomes, eight screen doors connected in a circle with a circus top and one door which opened. I was hired because I was 6' 3" and tall enough to put it up. And that job took me to Florida in 1966

And there was Candy Moisser as old as my mother but looking  older, I being  22. My mother was a beauty but Candy was trying to be painted Hollywood and not Hollywood Beach Florida where they, she and her boyfriend, killed her millionaire husband by bashing in his head with a coke bottle. She and her lawyers were there in the bar on Key Biscayne every night. She looked at me with a dull stare. She got off even though her boyfriend's bloody hand-print was found right on the counter next to the body. He did to. Very strange days.

Forty-five years later and here I was living on Hollywood Beach Florida. Living here is the last job I probably will have and the one that will pay me the best, around half a million just for living here. Candy would like that.

Maybe if I am lucky I will find a cure for cancer, that could be my last job. Pay is good. Read today that a cure for cancer would be worth fifty trillion dollars for the US or $100 trillion for the whole world. Even a one percent cure for cancer would be worth $500 billion just in the US. And I am working on it. Right I never had a course in Biology but it is not always what you know but what you don't know that counts. For example I don't know that I can't cure cancer same as the guys that invented Kodachrome. They didn't know that everyone in the photo business knew that the theory of Kodachrome was not doable.  If they had just asked we would never have been besotted with Kodachrome all those years and Paul Simon would be shy one song.

There is a good chance that my cancer cure idea will generate a clinical trial by a major drug company this year. You never know where a cure will come from, this one will be a big surprise. If I live long enough I plan to take a course in Biology so I can better understand my cure.

Then there is broadcasting. When my photo lab failed, made large Cibachrome murals and other stuff, we were the best but that was before computer driven photocomps and Ink Jet mural printing appeared, that was  when I got into broadcasting. Didn't know a thing but two years later or less I was an expert witness before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications with the august Billy Tauzin its leader and the question at hand the modulation to be used for a digital TV transition in the US.

Billy along with his cohorts choose wrong for us, probably right for himself, and we got stuck with 8-VSB the worst modulation in the world. I was there to support DVB-T, the European standard, the best modulation at the time though now maybe the Chinese have the best. Helped Intel test that modulation a few years ago. Classify that job as unpaid.

Today, 11 years later, broadcasters and the FCC are trying to find a way to now transition again to you guessed it, either the current DVB-T, DVB-T2 or the Chinese standard. I told anyone who would listen then, 2000, or later that the US would have to transition to a modern standard that worked sooner or later. Told Kennard to his face and the laughter of a large audience. Told Powell through his minions, he would not see us. Told Tauzin but he was to busy making an exit from Congress to the green of drug land. Told most of the FCC commissioners, department heads and top technicians and many agreed with me but could or would not do anything. Told Congresspersons and Senators to no avail. Can you call that a job? Worked hard for years but did not get paid until now. Now it is going to pay off.

Almost got a job in Nam. Radio room operator in the central highlands. No I did not know a thing about operating a radio room. Also didn't know that a bribe of $1500 was required. Didn't get the job. My army draftee intelligence job almost got me a job with Air America (the CIA), partly because of my intelligence background and partly because I knew where to go to ask for the job, the Vientiane Laos airport where somebody in a quiet hanger talked to me for an hour or so about the war recession and how they were laying off. That was 1970 maybe July. Anyway the radio room got over-run a year later and a lot of guys died. One job I lucked out and didn't get. Add the oil platform roughneck job off Sumatra I didn't get while in Bangkok. That was probably a bad idea to.