I was on South street in Philadelphia recording a music video. Lots of curious passerbys on the sidewalk, but one young man happened to stop and chat. He had a purple mohawk, was wearing a plaid shirt and striped pants and carrying a ferret. He says to me, "I hear you TV guys are all weird."

Was televising Micheal Jordans second 3peat in Chicago, when we came in on game day, the technical director checked his special effects, only to discover that one channel wasn't working, even though it was ok the day before.

I narrowed the problem down to a specific board in the generator. Chances of getting a replacement were very slim.

I called their office manager, this was about 4 hours to air. He called me back 1/2 hour later and said he found another generator at a rental house in north Chicago. My second tech jumped in the car and headed out. I had the existing generator ready to remove when he got back, we stuck the replacement in the rack, not knowing what the status of the rental was. Installed and fired it up. The techiuncsal director had ll his effects on a floppy disk. He loaded his effects, gave it a quick check when the producer announced 60 seconds to air. That was close, but not the worst.

This was the worst:

I was in Manhattan on the opening day of the NBA season, A New York sports channel was doing a pregame remote from a sporting goods store a few blocks from Madison Square Garden. We were being powered by a generator. Unfortunately, the lighting for the show was using the same generator, teeing their lights off of my power cables.

3 phase electricity can be tricky, the lighting guy was connecting to the generator and managed to cross the phases, must have been color blind, but as soon as he did, the generator spiked and blew up just about everything in the truck.Smoke was coming out of my test equipment, capacitors in the router started popping like firecrackers, every single audio distribution amplifier blew a fuse. Among other disasters, the truck was dead in the water. I told the tech manager to call the control room and tell them to load alternate programming. He was a bit of a goof, really didnt understand the gravity of the situation, despite all the smoke. Called the office and was told the truck doing the game in MSG would do what they could. I said bring me every fuse they have and portable audio and video distribution amplifiers plus any portable audio mixers they had. Long story short, between their second tech and I with a lot of fuse replacement and patch cords we actually got on the air. That was my miracle on 34th street. Several years later I was doing a super bowl in New Orleans and the graphics operator on that show was all o the one who did the show in New York. Small world. Like wetting my pants in a dark suit, I got a nice warm feeling, but nobody seemed to notice.

World cup at the Meadowlands in NJ. Doing the game for German TV. As everyone was packing up after set day (Game the next day) half the truck went dark. WTF? Turns out one of the 2 isolation transformers had shorted out.

Luckily the truck was based out of Philadelphia and there was a spare transformer at the shop. Quick phone call and an assistant from the office headed to NJ with the spare. Also luckily, my predecessor on this truck was working on another truck. These transformers are almost as big as a mini fridge and are buried in the underbelly of the truck We (mostly he) got the truck back on the air about 3AM, I went to my hotel room to try and get a couple hours of sleep, when I opened the door to my room, I scared the shit out of some guy they had given my room to, dunno how that happened.

More horror storied to come.