 |
| So many buttons. What could they possibly all do? |
Anyway, the cause of the snort seemed to be some kind of feeling her dad wasn't the world's foremost authority on doing more than one thing at once. I had to concede, she had a point. More often than not, I struggle to do ONE thing at once. Even NO things at once can prove problematic, and doing no things at once is my absolute favourite thing to not do.
Daughter then went on to express her doubts about anyone who sports a Y chromosome having the ability to multitask. She backed up this shockingly sexist allegation by quoting the gender imbalance in her class at school. Daughter is in something called the I.L.C. which I think stands for Super Intelligent Freaky Kids. (What do you mean, those initials don't work with those words? Also what do you mean, there aren't even enough letters for that many words? Shut up)
The point is, the girl S.I.F.K.'s (go back and read it again) outnumber the guy S.I.F.K.'s at a ratio of almost 2 to 1. You can't argue with those statistics. It's science.
Some kind of wacky miracle then, I do the job I do.
Superficially put, at least according to my official job description, my core responsibility is the presentation of the breakfast programme on Newstalk ZB. On the face of it, that mostly involves playing a few CDs and telling Hosking to stop talking so we can do the news on time.
The reality is a little more complicated. There are pre-recorded interviews to edit, audio from live events to air, Today In History files to maintain, podcasts to create, a highly popular web video to write, produce and star in... oh, she's all go.
Quite often, I have to do several of these things at once. Sometimes, I actually CHOOSE to, just to make things hard for myself. Right now for instance, I'm writing this blog while pretending to be interested in Hosking talking about Margaret Thatcher's funeral arrangements. Not easy, but then feigning interest in what Mike has to say never is.
Somehow I seem to cope with this. Over the years I've trained myself to work at this level, adding in more and more tasks to my daily routine until now, 12 years on, I'm almost good at my job. Oh, sure I cock it up MOST days, but occasionally I actually get everything right.
In spite of being not JUST a mere male, but the sad old, befuddled dad of a smart-mouthed 12 year-old to boot, there ARE moments some weekday mornings when I successfully manage to do more than one thing at a time.
Case in point...
This is me at 8:15 last Thursday morning; We were playing back an interview we'd pre-recorded with Ozzy Osbourne the week before. As I do with all our interviews, I was recording it to use in the daily Hosking That Was podcast I compile for the Newstalk ZB website after every show. I was also recording it in a different place for the weekly Best of Breakfast show which plays on Sunday mornings. While I was doing that, we were pre-recording ANOTHER interview in a completely different studio. While we were doing that, we were digging up some audio of John Lydon (AKA Johnny Rotton) appearing on the Project in Australia. Once it had buffered, I recorded and edited a 2 minute section of it to play on air off the back of the Ozzy Osbourne interview which was now coming to an end, which meant I needed to get Mike to wrap up the interview he was now pre-recording so he could get back into his usual studio in time to back-sell the Ozzy Osbourne interview we'd just replayed.
By my calculations, that's at least 6 things I was doing at once. (Not counting breathing and remaining upright)
Suck on that, S.I.F.K. daughter.
Next week, I'll discuss how amazing it is I can do my job given how much I hate mornings. Oh, hang on, I may have already mentioned that. About 17 or 18 thousand times.
 |
| Staying on air AND keeping to time. Those are the minimum requirements |
No comments:
Post a Comment