Murphy's Law

Today I was looking forward to a nice and easy day. I've been learning how to work the playlists (imputing in our commercials into the regular military commercial mix) and Malta has been teaching me little by little everyday. I'm learning from my mistakes. This morning started off bad. I had to wake up at 5am for physical training but I woke up at 4am to go to the bathroom and could'nt go back to sleep. I got all ready and laid my head down at the smoking area where we all meet. We ran about 2 miles together and also did a little cardio. Gunny wanted to get to work so we were moving fast. On the run I came in 2nd as usual. KC is always way ahead of me. I can beat the other 5 Marines though. I don't know about Corporal Hunter?

I got ready for the day and went down to where we meet to go to work. Malta came down and informed me he had the day off. I would be by myself doing everything. I've done it before. No worries. We go to work and Gunny immediately comes up to me and tells me we need to make a television and radio commercial on the Marine Corp's new liberty policy. Marines are given liberty cards (red for new Marines, gold for responsible Marines) and there were a few incidents that caused us to have a curfew of midnight off base. With the new policy the gold card holders won't have a curfew. That's great news for people who want to spend the night in a place like Naha, the capital of Okinawa, that is a few hours away. I put that in the back of my head.

I first needed to do the dailiies which are the movies, weather and yen rate. Gunny calls it my speed bump in the morning. I did the movies just fine but I tried to do the weather and it wasn't working.

Murphy's Law –noun, the proposition that if something can go wrong, it will.

The computers were acting kinda screwy so I asked Staff Sgt. Woolston (who knows the system) what to do. We played around with it but nothing was working. We couldn't do anything. I was stuck with nothing to do. Staff Sgt. talked to Master Sergeant Harvey about the servers. They discovered the servers had fried. They restarted the computer and everything had been deleted.

Keep in mind I came into work at about 8:15ish. At 11 Gunny asks me how my work is coming along. I tell him the bad news and he said that we need to have those commercials on the air today and to make it happen. With Castillo's help we divided and conqured. Malta had been revamping the dailies to make them look even better. He was nearly done with them. We used his version of the dailies and got them onto the main computer. I looked through the e-mail that had the new liberty policy and broke it down for the viewers. Castillo started working with the computer and making it all work. She did a voice over and it was nearly done. I quickly ate lunch and then started on the programming.

There is a whole process with making sure the dailies for yesterday don't play today, the playlists for the rest of that day (starting at 4pm) and the next are put in correctly, the programming already played are deleted and everything is all playing correctly. Once that is all done comes the horror of "clicking and dragging". This is where I put in the stuff we at AFN make. The small advertisements and the island news breaks the news section produces. It's tedious and I need to go through every commercial break and put in at least one of OUR commercials or dailies. Of course, I want to put a lot of weather and yen rates in the morning and movies in the afternoon to intise people to go to the theatre that night. This all usually takes around 1.5-2 hours. During this time I get to listen (and briefly watch) the TV. The View isn't really that bad of a show. I usually just listen to a lot of news. Go figure?

When I finished that I found Gunny and told him about the commercial Castillo and I created. He watched it and didn't like her voiceover. It happens. He wanted me to give it a shot. Staff Sgt. Woolston and I worked together and he said my voice sounds "sing songy" and that I need to talk in sentences not phrases. I haven't had any voice training but I'm working on it. Gunny also said I needed to work on announciation. Staff Sgt. Woolston ended up doing the voiceover for the TV commercial. Ha.

We had to wait for Staff Sgt. Early to finish recording his radio show before we could work on the radio commercial. Staff Sgt. Woolston taught me how to work the program (I totally forget most of it though). It's a totally new program he was showing me. They use the same program when doing the live radio shows. Oh boy. "The Ski Show" - coming to a radio near you. He let me record the commercial.

My voice is now floating around the airwaves.

In conclusion, my work day was long, tedioious, a lot of hurry-up-and-waiting but I learned a few things and I was thankful even though Malta had the day off he still was thinking ahead and solved a problem he wasn't even there for.