Golden Minutes Introduction
Golden Hours is a radio reading service of Oregon Public Broadcasting. It's intended for the blind, disabled, and elderly. The director of the program, Jerry Delaunay, is blind, as is the other employee (technical director, John Stiers), and several of the volunteers.
This is an occasional diary about the experiences volunteering at Golden Hours.
Aha! -- Thursday, May 27, 2004
Today was an "aha" day, like the day when you finally understand how something works or why something is important. I've had a couple of these at Golden Hours. The previous one happened when I was working the mixing board one Tuesday morning and Willy, one of the other volunteers was there.
Willy is a volunteer only because they don't pay him. He's legally blind (although he can recognize me from across the room), and cerebral palsy confines him to his motorized wheelchair. But he's there all the time, and he knows everything about running the broadcasting equipment. He and Jerry and John are the ones who the rest of us turn to when we can't figure out what we're doing.
Willy and I were talking about movies and TV. Although blind, Willy likes to go to movies and he has the complete cable package for his TV; all the premium cable channels. (This is a guy who lives in a mobile home so small that, as Jerry says, you barely have room to swing a dead cat around, as long as you don't have a cat.) Anyway, Willy was telling me that Comcast has a video-on-demand service for their premium cable channels, so you can watch the programs whenever you want, not just when they're normally aired. This makes it easier for people like him who have a hard time reading the TV listings to watch the programs they want. Apparently, it's easier for him to make out the menu for picking video-on-demand programs than the TV listings in the newspaper or the TV-based listings.
That's true he said, but the Comcast folks implemented this feature with no thought for blind people. The reason being that the only way to choose these programs is with a TV-based menu, where you use your remote to scroll through a list of programs and hit Enter to choose the one to watch. There are no alternate ways of selecting (such as entering alphabetic characters or even calling on the phone) that totally blind people could use to select a program. For example, he said, John has all the premium channels too, and he can't use the video-on-demand feature because he can't see it.
I asked Willy why John had all of the premium channels in the first place, because he is totally blind. He sees nothing. Willy said that John does like to "watch" TV, and that he's a big fan of westerns. So when he found out about the video-on-demand thing, he told John about it and told him he'd be happy to come over to his house some time and set up the programs John wanted to watch. John said thanks a lot, but that wouldn't work either. Why not, Willy wanted to know. Well, it turns out that John has his cable box in his bedroom, hooked up to a receiver and a set of speakers. There's no monitor there at all, no TV set, no picture. After all, he's blind. Why should he spend money on a monitor. Aha. So John can "watch" TV, but he can't use video-on-demand.
Anyway, today's "aha" moment came when I was going into the studio to get ready to do the Oregon Today newscast, something I do on Thursdays from 7:00AM to 10:00AM Pacific time. One of the segments we do is fifteen minutes reading the grocery ads from Albertson's. (Thursday is Albertson's day, Tuesday is K-Mart and Rite Aid, etc.) There was a sign by the microphone telling people that when they read the ads, they should just read the ads. No reading recipes, no getting into big long discussions about food, etc. Just read the ads. I asked Jerry about the note, because I've sometimes been know to talk on-air with Donna, my usual Thursday newscasting partner, about what could be done with some of the produce in the ads, what you could make with this or that, thinking that would spice up the program a bit. I mean, really, reading items, quantities, and prices for fifteen minutes isn't exactly Masterpiece Theater. But Jerry said that people had called in to complain, not about me, but about a certain evening reader who shall remain nameless. The problem, Jerry said, is that people use these ads when they go shopping. They record the segment, sometimes even automatically recording it using their computers and downloading onto MP3 players, and take the player along to the store with them. They do the same thing with TV listings (which people read in the evening), record them and use them the way sited people use the TV guide, to find out which programs are on which channels while they sit at the TV.
So, my assumption that the shopping ads needed spicing up because people would be bored with just the facts is totally wrong. All they want is the facts. They don't want to have to listen to or fast forward through my pithy comments on their tape players in the grocery store when they really want to remember what brand of toothpaste is on sale. Aha.
Today was also a learning day for me. I like it when I learn something new. I started out at Golden Hours because I thought it would be fun to read books to people. It is! Then when the opportunity came to be a live reader, I thought that would be exciting and something new to learn. It was! Then I volunteered to work on the mixing board during a morning show, just to learn more about the broadcasting equipment. Although ancient and simple compared to modern studios, the Golden Hours control room still has enough mixers and CD players, and minidiscs, and other stuff to take a while to learn. They have multiple feeds. One is aired on the SAP channel of the OPB TV station, the other over the Internet. Sometimes both feeds are identical, sometimes not. So there is an automation program that they use to automatically route programming to the appropriate feeds. During my Tuesday shift (or any morning for that matter), the program releases control to the board operator at 7:00AM and takes back control at 10:00AM. Between those hours, I am in control, activating and deactivating the mikes of the newsreaders, playing public service announcements and station identification, and turning on my own mike to announce program segments.
I was worried before I got there today because Jerry told me he wouldn't be there because he had a test to take (some volunteer coordinator certificate he was after) and would I mind running the board myself and allowing Donna to do the reading. I told him that Donna was on vacation and that I would be the only reader. This made him pause, but he said that he would ask John to come in early that day (Jerry usually gets in very early, 6:00AM or so, and leaves early, while John gets in later, about 9:00AM and leaves very late -- this allows them to have coverage so that someone who knows something is there most of the time). I said to Jerry that if it didn't work out with John, not to worry, because I would give a try to both operating the board and reading the news. I'm sure many newscasters on real radio stations do this, but actually I wasn't sure if I could do this without fumbling and a lot of dead air. Still, it seemed like an interesting challenge and an opportunity to learn. I spent last night planning out how I would load up as many public service announcements (PSAs) ahead of time as I could, then reload new ones while some were playing, and do all the reading from the control room.
When I got there this morning, I was excited by the prospect of this. But both Jerry and John were there, and John was running the board. I told John about my excitement and how I would have gone about doing it myself. OK, he said, but there's an easier way. Look here, he said, and he put the automation program into a basic state, where you can alter all the programming. (I usually use it on a screen where I can call up the things I want to play as I need them, queuing things up for play three or four at a time. He was at more of a basic programming level, something I knew little of yet.) The top line is the master program, he said, pointing at a screen I knew little about, just cruised past usually to get to the screen I did want. Just arrow down and then load the program AM4. AM because it's the morning and 4 because it's Thursday, day 4 of the week. It has all the station breaks and PSAs loaded in and stops and returns after each set. Just play it off Pot 3A instead of 7D (the port on the mixer that plays the items stored on computer). And if you want to change something, you can modify the program as needed, but just don't save the changes.
Ah, so that's how a blind guy runs the board!
--Steve
Enjoy the sun -- Tuesday, June 1, 2004
On the days I run the mixing board for the Oregon Today program, today being one, I normally arrive at OPB around 6:30AM. Usually, someone else who knows something (Jerry, John, or Willy) is already there. But today, no one was. Just me, and the two readers, Tony and Marge. That's not a big problem unless something goes wrong. But there's this whole mysterious procedure of putting blank minidiscs in certain drives and queuing them up for recording at various times, all of which is still a bit foggy to me, because nothing seems to be written down. I can look at the basic automation program, which lets me know that something is happening to unit 5 at 7:00AM, but I don't know whether that means it's going to play what's on the disc in that drive or needs to record an audio feed onto that disc. I assume it's going to play what's on the disc, so I leave everything alone, which I find out later is wrong. I should have put a new disc in and set up for recording. So some program that should have gotten recorded for playback next weekend didn't get recorded. Maybe next week I'll learn.
Then at about 8:25, John calls and tells me that the Writers Almanac segment for today that I'm supposed to play at 8:30 is not on the hard drive. Instead, I'm supposed to use a minidisc that's on a shelf behind me and queue it up to the appropriate place. A frantic few minutes ensue, but I do get Garrison Keillor to talk about writers born today, not last Tuesday.
Sometime after 9:00, a volunteer named Dan comes in. Dan is 90+ years old, but he looks and acts much younger. He is mentally sharp, has a friendly, kidding nature, and looks fairly fit for a man his age. His body is starting to betray him though. Today he is wearing a piece of heavy paper (probably cut from a manilla folder) over one of the lenses of his glasses. It's something about that eye not working quite right, and it's better if he just blocks the whole thing off. On other days, I've seen him have a cardboard tube taped around one of his fingers, keeping it straight. He seems to take a very do-it-yourself approach to his healthcare, although he told me he's in a research program at OHSU (Oregon Health Sciences University) in which once a year (or maybe it's six months) they pick him up, take him out for breakfast, run tests on him at OHSU, and then bring him back home. He says when he dies they're going to take slices out of his brain to see how he thinks.
Dan usually monitors the recordings of the book readers, making sure the audio really is there, making sure the length of the recording is as specified, and that the readers end with the appropriate closing (the last words on the recording must be "Golden Hours radio network." Today, however, he couldn't get the minidisc he wanted to use to work. He stuck a disc in, couldn't get it to play, and couldn't get the disc back out. I went over to help, and it looked to me that there was no power. Cabling is a mess, of course, but I tracked the unit's cable back to the power strip and it was plugged in. I plugged it in better and tried again, but still no power. Then I got on hands and knees and traced the power strip cable back to the wall. What do you know, it was unplugged. So I plugged it in and everything worked fine. Dan was very grateful. He even came over to me a few minutes later and asked just what I had done to fix things. When I told him I just plugged the power strip into the outlet, he said that he wanted to know because the unit was working better than it ever had before.
Around 9:30, I realize John is still not here and something probably needs to happen at 10:00, recording something off of somewhere onto something. I look at automation, and it's unit 5, so I find a blank disc and set it up to record. Perhaps John won't think I'm a total doofus. At about 10:03, John calls again and says that he's been waiting at the bus stop since 8:30 and the bus still hasn't come. He wants me to put in the disk in unit 5 for the 10:00 recording and just then realizes that he's too late. I explain that I've done it and he seems relieved. Although, how relieved could a blind guy be who's been standing at a bus stop for 90 minutes waiting for a bus.
On the way home, I stop at the liquor store. I get what I want and stand in line behind a small, elderly lady who buys a single, small bottle of Kahlua. As she gets her change, she slowly and carefully unzips a leather purse the size and color of a baseball mitt, counts the change, and one by one drops the coins in. As she grabs her package to leave, the man behind the counter tells her, "Enjoy the sun." "Grandson," she says. "My son is already old enough to have children of his own." The man just smiles and we both watch as she totters out the door.
--Steve
What a memory! -- Thursday, June, 3, 2004
Jerry asked me to stick around after today's broadcast to go over the Golden Hours programming schedule. I've been maintaining his website, omnimedianetworks.org, and the schedule there is not really up to date. Jerry was the board operator this morning, and I read alone today, because Donna was still on vacation. When we finished and I told Annie I was going in to see Jerry, she said he had an appointment with the "big guy," who I assumed was the head of OPB. (Actually, it was Jack Galmiche, who is the CEO of OPB.) From the other room, John asked me what I needed to see Jerry about, and I told him about wanting to update the schedule. He said he could do that with me, so I got Annie to give me the printouts of the schedules she had made up -- two three-page tables with a 24-hour, seven days a week schedule on each of them, one for the Internet broadcast and one for the SAP (secondary audio programming) broadcast. John, of course, being totally blind, couldn't see any of this material. So I read off to him each of the programs, starting with Sunday at midnight in the Internet schedule. He verified or corrected each of the listings, all from memory.
Midway through the schedule, Jerry interrupted us by bringing this gentleman (Mr. Galmiche) over. Jerry introduced me and we chatted a bit about some of the volunteer work I was doing. He had his OPB badge on, so I could see his name and how it was spelled. After he left, I turned back to John and struggled to find my place in the schedule. John knew exactly where we were and which program was next. Not only hadn't I remembered where we were in going through the schedule, I had already forgotten Mr. Galmiche's name, and I had to look it up on the OPB website before writing this piece.
This is what John has to do all day just to function. He remembers settings on audio equipment (how many clicks back or forward it takes to access particular functions). He knows the orders of menus on the equipment, he memorizes how to program his cell phone. And it happens with no practice. We all hear stories about people memorizing directions by remembering how many steps it is to the next turn or to the door, etc. But remembering the menus of high-tech equipment is to me even more impressive. I'm pretty sure I don't have what it takes to be a blind person.
--Steve
While I was painting the fence -- Sunday, March, 27, 2005
I didn't really intend to take so much time between entries. But when the weather got nice last summer, I was determined to paint the wrought iron fence that surrounds the front of our house. The painting part wasn't so hard (I used Rustoleum cans and held up a big cardboard backsplash), but the stripping part was killer. I used massive amounts of stripping chemical and needed really strong rubber gloves and plastic goggles to protect my eyes. It took forever to strip off the old paint, and some areas I never could get it all off. Later, one of my neighbors told me that one of the former owners of our house (a little old lady) used to come out and touch up her fence all the time. Thus the areas that were extra hard to strip.
Anyway, one day led to the next, and then the family trip to North Carolina in July, and somehow I never got back to writing about Golden Hours, until now. I still volunteered two or three times a week, and interesting things still happened. And I still enjoy it.
What's new at Golden Hours? On a sad note, Dan Seifer passed away recently. Dan was a volunteer for many years, and it seemed like whenever I was there, so was he (so he must have been there all the time). Dan was in his nineties when he died, but you'd never know if from looking at him or talking to him. He was a kind, independent, gentleman who seemed twenty or thirty years younger than his chronological age. He had some physical problems, but he dealt with them in a way that let you know that they were just obstacles he'd figure out how to overcome. For example, he had trouble with a finger, and I'm not sure what the trouble was. But he'd fashion a cylinder out of a piece of construction paper and put it on his finger to keep it straight. No need for fancy bandages or braces. Likewise, one of his eyes sometimes bothered him, distortion or flickering or some such. To deal with that, he cut out a piece of paper exactly the size of his glasses lens, and taped it on. With that bad eye out of the picture, he could carry on as before.
A few months before he died, Dan traveled to New York (at the request of his daughter, I think). The rest of us at Golden Hours thought he'd never return, but Dan claimed he would, because he liked his independence and wanted to live in his own place. He did return and I'm thankful I had a chance to see him again before he passed away. He was slower, more hard of hearing, and I don't think he was feeling well. Perhaps it was senility setting in, but Dan was very articulate about what he was feeling. He said things were just slower and fuzzier and that his body was just failing him. Perhaps the physical part of his brain was failing, but not his spirit.
Dan was in an aging study with Oregon Health Sciences University. He told me many times that when he died they were going to slice up his brain and figure out how he thinks. I sure hope they do, because I'd like to be able to think like he did if I ever reach that age.
In other news, I now seem to be the webmaster of the omni media networks website. I recently did a complete look-and-feel overhaul of the site to make it seem more professional. Actually, I took my cue from the Oregon Public Broadcasting site. If you compare them, you can see the similarities.
Another thing I'm helping with is an internet radio, which we're hoping to make available to Golden Hours listeners. The CEO of the company that markets these is blind himself and I've only spoken to him over the phone (we meet in person this coming week when he'll be in town). But he's got one of these hard-driving Boston accents and he never shuts up. It's sell, sell, sell, all the time. In contrast, the engineers who are developing and maintaining the product are Russian. I'm not sure where they're physically located; I use a US phone number to call them, but I hear a foreign language (Russian, I assume) being spoken in the background when I talk to them, and they definitely have Russian accents.
Deb and I also recorded a couple of public service announcements. Omni Media Networks, being a nonprofit, has a car donation program, so we wrote and recorded a couple of spots to encourage people to donate. In one, I chide Deb for being late and encourage her to get a new car and donate the old junker to Omni. In the other, she explains that she got a new car and donated the old one, and I now want her to take me to work. We play these spots all the time on Golden Hours, so if you tune in almost any time of the day you're bound to hear one.
Aside from these special projects, my normal schedule at Golden Hours is this.
On Mondays, I go in for a hour to record a book. I just finished one of my favorites, It Looked Like For Ever, by Mark Harris, which was relatively hard to read because it's told from the point of view of a not-very-well-educated baseball player and it's written in the vernacular. So, Henry, the main character, talks about his "prostrate," and about "silvernears" (instead of souvenirs), among other sound-sorta-like words. Next on my plate is Stone Cold, by Robert B. Parker, which I assume will be much easier to tackle cold. When I finish a book (one hour a week until I'm done), it's queued for broadcast on Golden Hours and will air when they get around to it (which means I have no idea when).
On Tuesdays, I run the mixing board for the morning news program, Oregon Today, which runs from 7:00AM to 10:00AM Pacific time. I pretty much have that job down, although I still have to refer to my notes. Marge and Tony are the news readers that day, and even though Marge often hacks and coughs her way through the broadcast and Tony acts like he can't wait for the whole thing to be over, it's still a pleasant time. And if not, I catch up on Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated.
And, on Thursdays, I'm the one reading the news with my partner Donna. Donna is a terrific person, but she's almost always late. Which isn't really a good thing on a live broadcast, but OK because I'm compulsively early. I think 20 minutes is about the latest she's ever been, but that covers the headlines and some of the national news. Donna and I have an especially good time reading the shopping ads (which happens at about 8:15AM). We read the Albertson's grocery ads, and since I like to cook and Donna is a personal chef by profession, we're often enthusiastic about ingredients, what you can make out of them, and about especially good prices. Although reading ads might seem boring, we try not to rattle on about recipes or what we'd like to make out of what's on sale, because people really do use our broadcast to plan their shopping. Some people even record the ads or transfer the audio to their MP3 players and take their player to the store when they shop. They're not really happy if they have to fast-forward through a bunch of recipes to get to the prices. At least, so I've been told in no uncertain terms.
--Steve
A Bad Day at the Office-- Sunday, April 3, 2005
Wednesday I had one of those days that you wish you could do over. I worked the mixing board that morning (I don't usually come in on Wednesdays, but because Jerry was scheduled to be out for medical reasons the next few days, I did it as a favor to him). I think by now that I can run the board in my sleep. Even so, I still have a cheat sheet I created when I first started, and I still refer to it every day. While I was running the board, Jerry was duplicating diskettes, copies of The Stylus, which is a newsletter for one of the organizations for the blind (I can't remember which one, because they all have similar names). I had in fact recorded the newsletter the day before, and now Jerry was duplicating the disks to send out to all the subscribers. (By the way, did you know that material for the blind can be sent in the mail at no cost? I didn't, but it's true.) He asked me to help by applying labels to the diskettes and inserting them into the mailers. This I could do during the lulls in my work (while the readers were actually reading something) and switch back and forth between that and running the board.
But, just that little bit of difference in a routine can throw a person off. It certainly did to me. Well, actually, the first thing that happened wasn't caused by the routine change, it was just a bad omen of things to come.
When I prepare to run the board, I first find a blank minidisc and insert it into player 7, which is tied into the output of the board. I set it to record the first few minutes of the broadcast (the headlines), which we replay at the top of the hour (at 8:00AM and again at 9:00AM). What I'm supposed to do is to go to the shelf where the blank minidiscs are stored, take one of them, and insert it. But, whenever I look at the players, they always have minidiscs in them. Some are labeled with program names (such as "Weekend Radio") and these I always set aside. But others are unlabeled (we have nine minidisc players connected to the board, so there could be many unlabeled discs in the players). I've come to learn that the unlabeled discs are usually left over from the previous evening's broadcast, where Willie or one of his cohorts were playing music recorded to temporary discs, and they forgot to clean up after themselves. So, instead of going to the stock of blank discs, I just take one of the unlabeled discs from one of the players, erase it, and use it to record the headlines. However, this time I made the mistake of using the unlabeled disc from player 7 (which as you recall, can be used to record off the board).
A few minutes later, Jerry and John called out to me, "Steve, can you bring the disc that was in player 7?" Uh-oh! It turns out that it was a disc of a show recorded the previous evening that was scheduled to be played that afternoon. "I used that one to record the headlines," I said. "Well, don't do that again," he said. (This is the sternest thing he has ever said to me.) However, when Willie came in, Jerry gave him a tongue-lashing about leaving the disc in the player the previous evening and not leaving it on his desk. "But that's what you told me to do," Willie said, and I do believe it's true. Later Willie said to me, " If I leave it on his desk, he can never find it, so he told me to leave it in the machine."
Anyway, my learning from this that just because blind people don't label things doesn't mean that they're not important. Even if they can see a little, it's hard for them, and they can't read the labels anyway.
So now I'm flustered, and that plus having to apply labels to cassettes put me into some weird frame of mind where I forgot to check everything like I normally do. When it was time for our financial guy, Gary Suchy, to be patched in over the phone to talk with our news readers, I somehow couldn't get him into the system, then started pushing buttons sort of at random, and ended up causing a big feedback loop that blasted everyone's ears (including listeners) before I finally figured out what button I didn't push in the first place (the one I always check for and always push).
While I was expressing my frustration and apologies to Willie, he told me what he did the night before. "I was trying to unplug the space heater," he said. "And I learned if you unplug this big cable here," pointing at the outlets, "the entire station goes down. That happened to me last night." Well, I guess things could be worse.