The end of the pay Cable TV service reminds me of the time when Yours Truly worked for them.
Yours Truly's first summer job was with Cable TV.
That was during the Olympic Games in Atlanta, where another college student and Yours Truly were hired to assist in the “live” broadcast of the Games on Channel 06 or 07 in those days. A red-eye shift for Yours Truly, starting from 12 midnight to 6 in the morning.
Due to contractual reasons, Cable TV was not allowed to broadcast the Games live in full. 30% of an event was the most we could broadcast live. Usually we didn’t care about that requirement as we didn’t plan to broadcast anything live, as our main goal was to provide regular verbal updates, without footage, on some of the more popular events every 30 minutes, hosted by an athlete-turned-commentator who used to play goalkeeper for the Hong Kong national soccer team.
But that requirement became a major issue when we decided to broadcast the men’s 100 metre race live.
Not every part of a race is created equal, and the most exciting part, of course, is the finale. That is why our plan was to broadcast the final 30 metres or so of the race. And what about the first 70 metres or so? Our plan was to pretend that we had overrun the commercials, but somehow managed to catch the last part of the race, just as we returned from the break.
We had the commercials lined up, and the host fully ready to start commentating at a certain time and hour. The schedule was announced months in advance and we could plan around it. Say, the race was scheduled to start at 4:00, and we were ready to end our commercials and start our “live” broadcast at about 4:02.
But we forgot about the jump starts, a pesky and annoying thing that had disrupted our plans. While the experienced Olympic runners were rarely unnerved by them, our host, this time a former track and field coach, was left completely stranded as he had to start rambling while staring at our cameras when we returned from the commercials, and we could not put the live broadcast on screen yet. Thankfully, he didn’t have to ramble for too long as the race finally started shortly afterwards, and Yours Truly remembers that our live broadcast began around midway through the race, despite the 30% requirement.
As for the most important question? Who won that damn race?
No one really knows. In fact, no one really cares, after all these years.
It was just another day in the office.
