The Button

When I worked in Channel 5 transmission, a long time ago now, there was an old lag. The kind you often find in TX. He’d been doing the same job for absolutely years; if I recall correctly, he’d worked on Channel 5 ever since its launch in 1997. Nothing fazed him, or at least seemed to faze him, which is the same thing. He was the kind of person you wanted to soak up every single last bit of knowledge from.

One day, we got talking about mistakes. Specifically, on-air mistakes. In my line of work, we’ve all made them. That horrible moment where your heart sinks, as something stupid happens to the channel you’re supposed to be protecting the output of. It’s a horrible, awful experience; you go home feeling like absolute shit. Sometimes you’re still thinking about it days later. I still have flashbacks to a mistake I made in 2014.

But I’ll never forget what this old lag told me, as a way of putting it all in perspective.

“Just imagine a button. Your job is to press that button at a certain time each day. That’s the only thing you have to do. Nothing else.”

I looked at him. “Yeah?”

“One day, you’d forget to press it.”