Scramble

I spent my teens and most of my adult life thinking I was a loser, completely inadequate at everything I tried. And it was true. I was under-educated, inexperienced, working class—and to top everything off, badly dressed. (I’m still badly dressed, but it’s a choice now.) I failed at job after job: secretarial, door-to-door sales, telemarketing, customer service—everything but waitressing.

I don’t know why, but I was a pretty good waitress.

And it seemed as though my destiny was to pour coffee and serve sandwiches for the rest of my life. Nothing wrong with that, except my feet were killing me and so was my ego. I wanted more, much more. I just didn’t know how to get it.

Then, thanks to some help and encouragement from my mom, I got a chance to go to radio school—and discovered my calling. After giving up on every other dream I’d ever had, I found my home in an industry that welcomed nomads and ne’er-do-wells.

If you could fake it, you could make it in radio.

But once I had faked my way into my first job, I had to scramble to prove myself. You see, I hadn’t been able to get through reading a two-minute newscast for my audition tape without making mistakes. I had tried over and over but kept flubbing. Finally in desperation, I used my newly-discovered talent for sound editing to cut out the flubs, and sent my doctored tape to a news station in Las Vegas.

I got the job.

A week later, my new boss, the news director, said, “You’re not the girl who was on that tape. You’ve got a week to shape up, or you’re out.”

Panic.

I was a 31-year-old, divorced ex-waitress with a 12-year-old son and a widowed mom to support. There was no turning back, so I scrambled.

Each night, I read newspapers out loud, trying to get through each story like a real announcer, without stumbling. I pretended I was Walter Cronkite, who was the reigning network anchor at the time, the epitome of journalistic integrity. Then I realized that was stupid—I couldn’t be Walter Cronkite. For one thing, I was a woman. I would just have to be me. Uh-oh.

My problem was lack of confidence. I was screwing up because I didn’t believe in myself. But how could I believe in myself when I couldn’t seem to get anything right?

I decided to fake it: when the mic was on, I would be the expert, the authority. I would know all.

And it worked.

By the next week, my boss said to me, “What happened to you? It’s like you’ve changed overnight.”

I kept my job.

But I was still worried about losing it, so I asked him what was the most important task in the newsroom, the truly indispensable skill. He surprised me by saying it was what is called “Ops”, the person who calls up newsmakers and records sound bites to insert into newscasts.

So, when I wasn’t on the air, I started hanging out in the ramshackle Ops room, making phone calls and cutting tape. I discovered that I liked it, and got pretty good at it. It turned out that in Nevada at that time, the governor answered his own phone and was happy to talk to a newbie reporter. A judge told me a lame joke (“Would you like to see my briefs?”)

I felt like an insider.

A month or two later, I found out that the station manager, a salesman to the bone, wanted to fire me because he said I “didn’t dress well enough” (see above). At a salary of $700/mo., new clothes were the last thing on my shopping list. But the news director and assistant ND stood up for me and threatened to quit if I was fired. The general manager backed down.

I had scrambled to become indispensable, and it worked.

“Scrambling” is what I call that desperate, last-ditch attempt to come up to snuff, to achieve what you thought you were incapable of doing.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling, incompetence, but we all have to start somewhere. The thing is, if you’ve got places you want to go, if you want to grow, you have to get comfortable with discomfort.

To get to the top of the rock, you’ve got to scramble.

Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay