Engineers tend to enjoy their work for its own sake. It's well known and accepted with resignation that nobody else in the building knows what we do in that weird little room near the back that's full of strange flashing lights and whirring noises.

But it does grind down your soul after a while, which is why I gave it up. After 25 years of crawling under desks to fix computers and getting woken up at 3 AM for some silly problem (and hardly ever getting thanked for it) I walked away. Five years later I'm much happier and don't miss it at all.

What I loved about the engineers I've met over the years are how unflappable most of them all. They rarely panic, while everything is falling apart and everyone is going crazy over something going wrong on air. 

When I was still a teenager, I managed to wangle a position at CHIN Radio, my very first "job" (volunteer, really), where I got an eyeful about how radio should - and sometimes, shouldn't - work. I'll never forget sitting in the AM control room, when an engineer was doing some work, bent down out of sight behind the board.

As he was working, there was a record playing on a turntable live on air. (We still used records in those days.) Suddenly, the turntable slowed down to a halt and eventually stopped altogether, its 33 1/3 slowly grinding down to zero. It made a horrible sound on the air as it ground to a halt and we didn't know what happened. 

I looked down at the guy fixing things and said with an urgency in my voice, "Dave, what happened? The record stopped in the middle of the song live!" 

And without missing a beat or any sign of panic, Dave simply replied, "Oh, it's probably because I just did this," at which point he reconnected some wires and fixed the problem and the record wowed back to life. He never showed any sign of panic and he continued repairing whatever it was he'd come in to fix.

That's why I admire engineers. Grace under pressure, unfortunately not always a character trait I can claim when something screws up in real time on the air.  

Did some of that during my full-time years in radio, tinkering with audio gear, both analog and digital, automation hardware and software, and spending time at a few transmitter sites around the province. While mess-ups, outages and dead air/off air situations were not exactly fun, I was usually able to rectify issues that were at our end. Other times, we were at the mercy of the area electric utilities (if we didn't have a generator) or our Internet providers.

I particularly miss working with one of our contract engineers, a ham and ex-TV guy who hails from Sudbury and was chief engineer at Pembroke's CHRO-TV for close to twenty years. Worked with him on a number of studio and transmitter projects, and he was also a great storyteller, talking about his time in TV with Mid-Canada, Baton and CHUM.

Shorty Wave wrote:

On reading the article RA posted to start this thread, it is interesting that engineers are more IT professionals these days. Makes sense, I listen to radio online about 30% of the time these days.

Stops making sense when the AM transmitter hiccups or there's an issue with automation or AES67/Dante audio that isn't rectified by a reboot or a head scratch..