Post 1553 - Your Lesson For The Day

Turns out that in the next 6 days I will be interviewing 2 people, both of whom work for Live 105 in Halifax.

One of them is Floyd, part of the Morning Mob with Cub Carson.

The other is with Neil Spence, swing announcer at that fine station.

It occurs to me that many of you reading this don't know what  a swing shift is.  Most of you work in an office environment and haven't been exposed to such terms.  It goes back to the days of factory workers who work different day parts throughout the week.  You know, they work 10-6 for 3 days and then 8-4 on 2 other days.  That's a  swing shift.  The term doesn't get used that much except for the dwindling number of factory and blue collar workers out there, and in the radio business.  In Neil's case, he works Wednesday through Friday nights until 11pm and then until 5pm on Saturday and Sunday.  Hence, a swing announcer.

I have worked some weird shifts in my life.  As a teenager, I worked one summer at the Burger King in New Minas, Nova Scotia.  I hated that job, but it enabled me to return to university that fall.  I had to focus on that, especially during times when the high school dropouts who worked there would give us college boys a hard time.  They knew that their future would contain lots of jobs like that one, if they worked at all; and this would be their final chance to put the screws to us, as we moved on to better futures than they could ever hope to have.  I think about those friggers from time to time and wonder what pathetic lives they ended up experiencing.  Then I chuckle a little bit.  Hee hee.

From time to time I'd work what was called a split shift.  You'd work, say, 10-2pm, and then have 3 hours off before returning to work from 5-9 or whatever the actual hours were.  It was a break, but not long enough to go home or have a nap or anything like that.  We were being paid a miserable amount of money, so there wasn't the cash to go shopping.  More often than not, I'd walk around, or read a book in my car whilst listening to the radio.  This was 1983, so I heard "What A Feeling" by Irene Cara from the "Flashdance" soundtrack a lot.

Of course, I eventually finished my degree and went on to fame and fortune and... oh, wait a minute.  Not so much.

Oh, well.

At least I'm not making minimum wage.

Hee hee.

Bevboy