Ira
When I got to work yesterday, I found I'd lost a friend. Oh, he didn't die. He quit. Some might say he retired, but he quit. His name is Ira. He's 3 or 4 years older than me, but even though he was black, we had a lot of common experiences growing up. As most of you know, I work at a TV station. Ira was there when I started. In fact, he'd been working at the station longer than anybody else. How long had he worked there? Well, when he started working there, the commercials and news reports were on movie film. The words you saw on the screen, we call them graphics, were on photographic slides. He was the reason I did so well at my job. We were a team. When I started, the commercials were on betacarts. Think of a VCR tape that movies came on. The commercials when I started were aired through a machine that held 40 carts. One of his jobs was to feed that machine while I put them on the air. But, that's not all he did. He was in charge of shipping and receiving. He took care of the mail. He dubbed syndicated programs onto betacarts and he he ran the tapes for the morning and noon newscasts. He seldom took vacations because his daughter was living in Japan. When she and her family moved back to the United States, he started taking vacations to visit her. It was then that people really realized what Ira did. It took 3 people to do his job when he went on vacation! Well, if you haven't noticed, the broadcast industry has changed and is still changing. The betacarts are gone and the bigger carts that had 2 or 3 programs on them are gone. We get our programs from satellites and they go directly into computers. Everything is on computers now. TV stations now have websites to better inform people when they want to be informed. The changes meant that jobs changed and Ira's did., as did mine. And it changed and it changed. Let me tell you. I've never worked with a harder worker in my life! He got things done when they needed to be done. He had to learn new skills that added to his work load and put more pressure on him. There were problems with other workers not doing their share which meant he had to do more. And, I guess, it finally got to him. Let me tell you a little more about this fine man. He was smart. A mathematical wiz that was wasted in this job. He collected stamps and coins that was to be his retirement. He was active, playing table tennis and regular tennis on his time off. He was a shortwave radio operator and had radios that could receive several countries. Our talks on smoke breaks led to me writing a book about growing up in my hometown. I will miss him. We never saw each other outside the station, but I will still miss him. I wish him all the best. I just wish he could have stayed little longer.
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