If you’re reading this on Wednesday, then I will be preparing for what might be a rather sleepless night.
You see, we at CFIS are once again broadcasting from the B.C. Northern Exhibition from Thursday until Sunday. We’ve done this in the past, so it should be fairly straightforward, right?
Well, part of my mind tries to convince the rest of me that’s what will happen, but another part of my mind keeps coming up with problems we’re going to have over the next few days. Three guesses which of those two parts will be doing most of the talking tonight.
Some of the problems my mind comes up with are fairly simple. I think about things like power outages at Kin 1 (takes us off the air but nothing I can do about it on site) or someone tripping over one of our cables (plug it back in, problem solved).
Other problems my mind comes up with (especially after I refuse to panic over some of the simpler ones) are a little more, shall we say, unlikely.
I have, in the past, wondered what I would do if for some reason while I was on the air from the BCNE, one of the songs started playing backwards. I decided after a few moments of thought that I would simply listen to the song and see if I could hear any hidden messages in it. I mean, everybody knows rock groups in the 1960s and 70s were hiding satanic messages backwards in all their songs.
I remember reading somewhere that one group decided to have some fun with this. In a long instrumental part of one of their songs, they had some barely audible lyrics.
If you were bored enough to play the record backwards to find out what horrible secrets they were hiding in the lyrics, you would hear one of the band members reciting his grocery list.
OK, so he might have been making devilled eggs, but I don’t know if even that would qualify it as a satanic message.
Other weird thoughts I have had for possible occurrences during the BCNE (usually getting weirder as the night gets later) and my first thoughts of how to get around them: alien invasion (try to get an interview with one of the aliens and hope our headset and microphone would fit their head); meteor crashing into Kin 1 (hope it hits the other corner of the building and not our gear); a scheduling conflict means the U18 Cariboo Cougars have a game during one of my on-air segments (get some practice in play-by-play announcing).
Of course, it will probably be a nice, quiet, straightforward four days and that pesky part of my mind will shut up – until next August.