Strangest Place in All the Land...

I have decided there is no place in all the land as strange as a peg access facility. For those that dont know that's "public education and government" and is an abbreviation for local access non-comercial television media centers. Most countys in CA have one, and all the large cities across the nation. They're pretty neat... you know "Wayne's World, party time, excelent," that was a fake public access show (i got to write about Wayne's World in my thesis, how tight is that?)

Anyway, I manage the P of the PEG, so I interact on a daily basis with local people who believe everyone in the county wants to see them or what they want to film on television. Often they are sorely mistaken, but kudos to them for doing it anyway.

Occasionally we get something awesome. We had a girl make a documentary on the local competitive laser tag community. I didn't even know that existed, and they were grown ups (20s-30s, but grown ups none the less!).

Or at this very moment there is a woman comandeering our studio for her show "World of dance Theatre" one of the biggest in-house productions anyone puts on around here, it even includes live snakes and I got to touch one!

Then we have the weirdos... There is a producer who looks like a balding einstein who is a constant plauge of haughtiness and near senility to anyone he can find. You can't escape a 25-30 minute conversation with him. You can answer the phone and look as intently at your monitor while furiously typing nothing in particular as long as you please and he will pay no mind. He has 5 weekly series. They are of the worst possible production value of anything we put on the channel (and remember this is public access, so that's REALLY saying a lot... ) He likes to film things along the lines of public meetings and try to tell everyone at the meeting how and where they should talk and behave to make his show best.

And then i get to hear all about it!
All the time.

So often he is filming a chalk board with no one in front of it with terrible audio that he feels the need to split between right and left channels in unecessary illogical ways, and he'll complain if we try to fix it for him. I have to hear all about his every idea and generally he doesn't like the way we do anything around here, we should, of course, do things the way he does. The way which makes no sense.

Mostly it's fun. I get to help people learn creative skills, put their show on the channel, and they get to tell their family and friends when their show is on tv. We play a few cool things like Democracy Now and the local battle of the blues bands, but mostly I never watch the channel I work for. At the moment I'm watching Ninja Warrior on the monitor that's supposed to play our channels at all times in case something goes wrong...

Sometimes I get to do the technical directing for live multi-cam set up shoots from a control room and look around myself and realize that it all looks very impressive to the untrained eye; really I'm typing and playing with 4 cameras attached to an Atari-style joystick in a small closet with no air flow and a gazillion AV machines blowing hot air.

I like PEG, it's easy (as long as you know how to deal with crazy), I work with people every day, I get to do creative things, and I'm not making money for "the man" off in some distant mansion on a coast somewhere who ownes a company I don't even know about that ownes the company that ownes the company that I work for. Most people who hear about or see what I do sound impressed... so why do I feel like my job is a joke? Is it really?

Maybe I like being a joke and doing nothing but sitting at my desk among the weirdos and then migrating to my couch.

Is that so wrong?