I started in video production back when the whole thing was analog. Since then, everything’s become digital and what I do now and how I do it’s completely different.
Except.
Cable. As in wires. As in the edit suites in which I work still use a bit of Ethernet, some USB, definitely power cords. And the thing that hasn’t changed, like at all, is finding yourself on hands and knees tracing down some cable to make sure it didn’t get disconnected, or same deal but you’re hunting around for the little power button on the back of your tower that’s not-so-conveniently tucked waaaaaay under the console.
So that didn’t really change after all these years.
Second.
This is what I call, have always called
Dog Ate My Homework
As in teacher says “David, you didn’t turn in yesterday’s homework” and I say
“My dog ate it.”
Of course that’s just an excuse children use ‘cause it’s the kind of thing they think actually works.
In my field, however, no one’s trying to make excuses. And even though there’s no dog eating our work, there for sure are computers and hard drives that can.
And do.
The first time I remember this coming up was in college for a creative writing course. I was pounding my story out on one of the earliest of Macs, the kind with so little onboard memory that it took several 3.5″ floppy disks to store the entirety of a beefy short story. In this case, 11 pages, single spaced. And, by the time the computer crashed, I’d only saved the first two of those pages.
Dog Ate My Homework.
Last year, I lost the project files for several video projects when the network on which they were stored became corrupted.
Dog Ate My Homework.
And my favorite:
That one time a virus took down my tower and everything on it.
Dog Ate My Homework.
As in…
That work is just gone.
Stone cold gone.
Recently, I hit on something that’s maybe unique to the present:
Dog Buried My Homework.
As in…
The homework exists in its entirety... but it can’t be delivered.
As in…
Because of some incompatibility somewhere in the system, OS, drivers, software versions…
The project won’t export. Meaning, in very basic, grade school terms…
I can’t turn in my homework.
We deliver digital files anymore, you see… so if I can’t make one, I can’t deliver the finished project.
Engineer/Techs are on the hunt to fix this sooner than soon as possible… which they absolutely will.
But until then…
Dog Buried My Homework.
:-(