November 11, 2011

I landed my current job in 2004.
Shortly after, a strongly worded memo was posted by the production department that all bits and pieces of audio needed to be saved with an "end date" (a specific month/day/year) so that old audio would show up as expired and could then be deleted to save computer memory space. 
Until this memo, we all put TFN (till further notice) as an end date, which meant a piece of production could run indefinitely.  It would never show up as out-of-date, and never be deleted.

Well, you can imagine how put out we all became upon finding out that instead of typing TFN we now had to type two numbers, a slash, two more numbers, a slash, and then two final numbers.
Oh!  The time consuming horror!

At the time, most of the stuff I worked with were perennial items, things that we reused every year, things that weren't supposed to expire.  Still, I was required to pick an end date.
To make it easy on myself, I decided to type 11/11/11.  Easy.  Just keep hitting ones with a slash in between.

Now, you must understand that up to that time, I'd never worked anywhere for more than five years.  In radio, people move around a lot.  They don't typically pay us much because they tell us we're having fun and we're lucky to be working at all, so we'll work for peanuts.  Consequently, since we're not paid much, we tend not to put up with a lot of managerial BS, and end up leaving every couple of years.  Or, a new conglomerate owner buys the station and fires everyone across the board.

As I typed in the new end date on so many pieces of production, I was very sure that by the time they all came up expired, it would be someone else's problem.  Not mine.

In 2004, the year 2011 was a hell of a long way off.
Today, 11/11/11 is one month off.

And I'm still here.

Thbbbt!