Let's talk about screwing up today.

First summer I was in college, I worked at Wal Mart, and it was a weird experience.

Made a lot of friends cleaned up a lot of poop, but that is a story for a different day.

My second, some around a college.

I worked at a community access television station called Orange TV in Orlando Ford.

It was a pretty good job.

I got to do whatever I did.

Graphic design added camera operation.

I did sounds, and I learned a ton that is still relevant to my life today.

Like, for example, that it does not matter what you know about lighting or screenwriting or cinematography.

You are dirt if you don't know how to properly coiling cable.

I also learned a thing or two about screwing up the very first to sign minute orange TV.

I went out.

We're filming like this banquet E thing that was on sound, and I could tell that the audio wasn't great.

I didn't know for sure that something was going wrong, but I was pretty sure that it wasn't.

It wasn't right later without me telling him about this.

The camera operator checked the audio and was like, Oh, that sounds real bad.

It was on the onboard camera, Mike, and not the hand held Mike.

So all the footage we take it to the beginning of the shoot was completely useless.

He managed to not go off, which was impressive.

Instead, just telling me if something seems wrong, you should tell someone.

Ah, good advice.

So the year 2000 back then, I was 1920 years old.

I did not have great fashion, so I still don't also haircut on.

You know this.

I wore a lot of thrift store clothes one day, a fair ways into my short tenure at O T V.

We were getting ready for a shoot in a parking garage.

The chute wasn't in the parking garage.

We were shooting a community event.

You don't care.

The producer on this shoot was this little guy.

But he was like, super solid.

And he had a mustache that was like perfect silver and very street on the bottom.

As far as I was concerned, he'd been in TV since the beginning of time.

I was very much respected him.

We were just breaking from getting our instructions, aunt.

He comes over to me and he puts me on the shoulder and he says, Green, you out rank.

May I look down?

Where is poking me in the shoulder?

And it's a patch and it looks like that Turns out my producer was not always in television.

He was at one point in the Air Force.

I will never forget that green yellow rank me that he said to me because like it was 90% joke.

But it was 10% frustration, a frustration with me with society, I don't know.

I was horrified.

Like I knew that I was wearing a military jacket.

I hadn't even really considered that it was once someone else's.

I also wasn't worried about like stolen valor here.

I don't think anybody was gonna confuse me, a 19 year old kid and too baggy jean shorts for a master sergeant in the Air Force, and my producer wasn't concerned that I was portraying myself as a member of the military.

He didn't think I was trying to fool anyone, but he had, like, opened my eyes a little bit to the fact that there were symbols on my body that I knew nothing about symbols that were part of other people's identity of their off their work of their pride and the sum total of everything I knew about that was that it looked cool.

I still don't know what a master sergeant is.

I didn't even know that the jacket I was wearing was from the Air Force.

It could have been any branch of the military.

And let's be honest, like as a young lefty, I little bit looked down on that career path, and yet I was wearing the jacket because it looked cool.

John.

I remember specifically that I kept that jacket for a little while, thinking I would probably wear it again at some point.

But I didn't.

Every time I looked at it, I thought, You know, what I know is that I don't know, like I don't know, and my producer poked me in the shoulder and gave me that 10% frustration he had told me.

But something didn't seem right.

And what that thing is is not as simple as whether we're on the onboard camera Mike or the hand held.

It didn't mean I was a bad person.

It just made.

It was complicated and I didn't really know it was up.

And it turns out there are other jackets in the world, so I wore one of those charts will See you on Tuesday.