Wow. That's a helluva way to show your resume.
That’s not too dissimilar from how I got my first broadcasting job.
Even though I was a teenager, I had been appearing weekly as a guest on a talk show. After a few appearances, I asked whether they had any openings. It looked fun, and it was something I had never done before. They told me to stop by during the week, so I prepared a résumé and went in. The manager was on-air with about twenty minutes left in her show, so they brought me into the control room. The board operator introduced herself, then left for coffee during a commercial break.
I watched the commercials play, looked at the paper spot log, and counted down the timers: ninety seconds, sixty, thirty. Still no board op. At fifteen seconds, I looked over the console, identified which carts were loaded, figured out the correct channels, and, with two seconds remaining, started the next cart, crossfaded it in, and opened the microphones. The show continued without interruption.
The manager looked up and mouthed, “Where’s _______?" I gave her the universal shrug.
The board op returned about a minute later very panicked. After the show, there was a brief discussion about what had happened, a few questions about me, and that was it: hired.
It was an extraordinary experience. I was treated as an adult, and most of the people I worked with had no idea I was still in high school. I had only been sixteen for about a month when they hired me. I would later take half a day off for graduation and wrote it on the station calendar. By then, I was a lower-level manager overseeing about thirty people. One of the news staff asked, “So, what did you major in?” I explained that it was my high school graduation, although I was also dual-enrolled and only a few credits short of an associate degree and would get that afterwards. “You mean to tell me I’ve been taking s**t from a high school student all this time?”
“Yep,” I replied, somewhat sheepishly.
The place could be brutal. This was not a place for a child. I did not mind it then and still look upon it fondly. Perfection was not the goal; it was the requirement. I usually worked forty to sixty hours a week while attending high school and college, and at peak periods, eighty to one hundred. It kept me away from home, which, for me, was an absolute blessing.
I also moved beyond the job I was originally hired to do and into engineering and design. I began repurposing leading-edge equipment to perform far beyond its intended capabilities and developing technologies that major corporate laboratories were still researching with teams of engineers. I was doing my own R&D, building production-quality devices alone, and putting them on-air twenty-four hours a day.
The chief engineer was cruel but fair. “It had better work the first time, every time, and I don’t care if there’s a g-dd-mned Category 5 hurricane outside.” Whenever I built a circuit or device, he would throw it onto the workbench and abuse it mercilessly. If it failed, he would say, “You did such a good job that you get to build it all over again—from scratch.” He would not return the original. I had to begin again. Some of the things I built twenty-five or thirty years ago are still in use today.
I loved the challenge of doing the impossible then, and I still do. I was the child who would work relentlessly on mathematics problems labeled “no solution.” To me, “impossible” usually means only that nobody has figured it out yet.
Human flight, space travel, and landing on the Moon were considered impossible for most of human civilization. Now you can take a shower at 35,000 feet in complete luxury.
I still have multiple binders of ideas I'd like to work on. Our wedding is going to require a few inventions to make the whole thing happen. I'm hopefully building a proof-of-concept prototype of one of them this week. I also have some designs for rocket nozzles which might have some decent gains in thrust, but I don't know enough about metallurgy (yet) to know if it's viable.
