Driving down here to Richmond, Virginia I was listening to an audio version of Barbara Ehrenreich of Nickel and Dimed, a book about how tough it is for the unskilled laborer in the U.S. and how many of these folks must work two jobs to make ends meet. Upon arriving here, I found one of my teachers, Rob Roberts, working five jobs simultaneously and having done so for nine years.
In a big metropolitan area the TV station helicopter is a monstrous Bell 407 with four blades and enough horsepower from a single turbine to move the Queen Mary. The 407 carries a pilot who worries only about flying the aircraft and talking occasionally to Air Traffic Control, a camera operator who points the camera at interesting events on the ground, an engineer who makes sure that the camera and video/audio communications links to the station are working properly, and the “talent”, a person with a good wardrobe and make-up whose voice and image skill out into viewers’ living rooms.
Richmond is a smaller city and only Channel 12 (NBC) even has a helicopter. In the afternoons Rob Roberts fires up the HeloAir Jet Ranger and does all four of the jobs that are being done by four separate people in a big city Bell 407. On days when he is unlucky some neophyte like me gets in and he now has to add a fifth job: flight instructor.
This is one of the things that I like about aviation. One is very often pleasantly surprised at the supercompetence of the people involved at every level. The mechanics are craftsmen. The pilots usually have an impressive range of other skills. The young ladies at the front desk of Richmond Jet Center are smarter, friendlier, kinder to a wayward Samoyed, and better looking than people working service jobs anywhere else in the city. How many other fields can we say this about? The one with which I have the most experience is software engineering. Despite the higher pay, I would say that the average denizen of the software world is not supercompetent, though often he views himself as such, and the customers are not typically pleasantly surprised.
This is actualy quite common in small-market media. At one radio station I had the job of engineer, producer, copy writer, music scheduling, telecoms, network admin, desktop support and “web master”. That and really anything else people decided wasn’t in _their_ job description. And I know a couple of other people at other stations like that, though most not with quite so many hats.
Didn’t get to fly a helicopter though, we got our traffic reports by fax. Should have been in TV, I guess…
Working around airplanes may be a lot more fun than being surrounded by electronic hardware. A nicer environment (in my opinion) makes people happier and friendlier.
Also, flying is a “magic” human endeavor. Computers make us more productive, give us access to better information, and entertain us. A GPS is a wonderful machine that I admire but cannot love; an airplane is a machine that I can love.
Computers help us live, but as the Romans knew:
“Vivere not est necesse, navigare necesse est”
That was before flying was possible…
I think that an incompetent pilot is much more likely to get drummed out of the field than an incompetent IT guy.
Even if you you isolate IT workers down to something like “financial programmers in heavily regulated industries” it is still possible to find complete incompetents like myself…
Cheers!
Lousy pilots die. Lousy programmers end up in management.
“Even if you you isolate IT workers down to something like “financial programmers in heavily regulated industries” it is still possible to find complete incompetents like myself… ”
Man, that hits the spot. Me too..
I noticed the same thing when I used to work as an extra in TV shows and movies. The people working on the set were working as a team in an incredibly coordinated fashion. It felt like a precision commando operation from an action movie. Everything was running like clockwork and everyone knew exactly what they needed to do and did it well.
It makes sense when you think about how much it costs to have all that equipment and all those people working. Every minute that you waste costs thousands of dollars. The joke about being an extra is that you have to “hurry up and wait”. That is, you’re expected to be ready hours ahead of time and just sit around so that everything is prepared in the off chance that they’re ahead of schedule. They’d rather pay 20 extras to sit around for 4 hours than waste 30 minutes of shooting time because those extras weren’t ready when they suddenly realized they could use them earlier than expected.