I work at the State Dept. Let's talk email.

[calimary]

260. With all due respect - I am not seeking a mid-level corporate job.

I know my limits. I'd rather do what I'm good at and confine it to that. I wouldn't go for such a job knowing it demanded technical skills or savvy in those things - which I freely admit - are WAY beyond me. WAY above my pay grade.

I left my last full-time news job just as they were starting to switch over to digital editing - for soundbites, interviews, actualities of all kinds to feed out to the member stations every hour. We all started learning the "wave file" system. I was very skilled in tape editing - with reel-to-reel tape, single-edge razor blade and splicing block. That's how we did it. That's the way it was done, across the industry. We were all instructed that, once you engaged the satellite, and started your feed from wherever you were (for me, in the L.A. bureau), then you go out and get yourself a cup of coffee while the feed is uploading or uplinking or whatever the term was. Because it was going to take that long. I had an assistant managing editor advise me to do that. It was hard. It was complicated. It was another layer of expertise that I had to try to adopt, and adapt to. And I tried. It was part of my job.

I will tell you this - when the way suddenly opened up for me to take early retirement (and with VERY young children at home, I didn't want to be away from home for most of the day/evening to do a job when I felt I should be closer to those little ones at that critical time), I grabbed it. And as I was leaving, on that last day, the first thing on my mind was relief - that I was leaving at THAT time. So I was not going to have to wrangle with all that new technology - when what I was good at was WRITING. And GOING ON THE AIR AND COMMUNICATING. Not fiddling with buttons and switches and inputs and wires and stuff. I'm simply not a techie.

When I started as a news reporter, you couldn't touch the equipment. You literally got your hand slapped, or physically pushed away. There were union members who did that. Union engineers and tape editors and board operators. They were the specialists in that, for which I admired and respected them. Because. THAT. IS. NOT. ME! That is NOT my skills set. I was very happy to confine myself to what I WAS good at, and leave the button-pushing and the wire-twisting and the installations and mechanics to someone who knew what they were doing.

As unions were done away with in my industry, it fell to us on the air-talent side to take up that job as well as the one we were good at. I had multiple calamities. I was a problem for some of my supervisors - I had to have them find me a different tape recorder to take into the field because I couldn't figure out or deal with the one they issued all the reporters - with 132 knobs and buttons on it that I could never keep straight. I could go pushing myself through a crazy, angry, partying-too-hard crowd in pursuit of an interview subject or to get to where the story was happening, and I'd inadvertently knock some of those buttons out of position and I'd wind up with NOTHING recorded when I got back to the bureau. They had to get me a "dumb-guy" recorder. I remember air checks I tried to record on "designated news days" when everybody in the market submits their work from the same day for awards. I'd have a stack of carts with different taped soundbites on them, to insert into my newscast at various places, in various stories therein. And in trying to load one, live, with the mic open, I knocked the whole pile over and the clattering went out over the air, all over the control board, my script, everything. When I had an engineer handling that part, such idiocy never happened. Shit like that happened to me a lot. I'm not a techie. And I would never claim to be one. Besides, the engineers were there and I also felt strongly that somebody like me shouldn't be asked to take a job from somebody like one of them. Especially since I was so lousy at it!!! I did writing and voicing and reporting. I did that very well. I kept getting hired for greater and more heavy-weight jobs because I was good at it. But have me try to engineer something and I might as well have been a cow brought in from the pasture before milking time.

So you play to, and MAKE USE OF, your strengths. I never claimed to be a technical expert. I wouldn't DARE! SO I'm never gonna be booted from most mid-level corporate jobs. Because I'm never gonna get one, or go after one, or try to get hired into one. I know better. And if anyone ever wanted to hire me for such a thing - they'd have to hire me a techie, too.

And I would think one would have hired or appointed someone at Hillary Clinton's level for her brains, her negotiating skills, her communication skills, and all that - and NOT whatever technical expertise or lack thereof would have come with the job.