A return to yesterday

I'd always had a hard time letting go of the CBC. Like a first relationship, I always remembered this job as my first and fondest. Bouncing around various departments on temp contracts for eight years was a wondrous experience. You see, the CBC was a vital part of Canada's identity for its first 60 years or so, and growing up in this country meant being influenced by the broadcaster in some shape or form. Even when the CBC wasn't being Canadian, it was not Canadian in a very Canadian way. The fact that we could watch British sitcoms and arty US films on a major network, for instance, set us apart from the Americans. And when we watched Sesame Street, we knew if we had tuned into an American channel or CBC based on the second-language skits – Americans had Spanish-speaking puppets, we had Kermit le Frogge.

During my broadcasting course at BCIT, I started to feel more disinterested and unresponsive to commercial radio, and my dial drifted toward CBC Radio more frequently. CBC Radio, unlike the TV side, was one of those things I had neglected pretty much my entire life. It was such a revelation just to hear interesting people talk every day without obnoxious commercials and loudmouthed sportscasters. When I mentioned to my BCIT instructors about my choice of station on my drives to and from school, I was told, “Get your mind off CBC right now. You'll never work there. They're unionized, and they do things very differently from the stations you're going to work at.”

Upon graduation, I submitted only one job application – to CBC Radio. As luck would have it, they had a temp opening in their "tape supply" room. Now, where else would anyone get a job splicing used, heavily edited recording tape into fresh product? Or spooling new, un-encased tape into empty reels? Or fast-forwarding miles of used tape through a reel-to-reel to check for quality? Twice a day, I'd make my rounds, through the newsroom, the current-affairs studios, producers' offices and edit suites to collect used tape. It was a surreal job, and I got to take my breaks hanging out with David Wisdom as he produced his uber-cool after-midnight show Nightlines, or in the back of the Studio 5 control room on my lunch hours watching Fanny Keefer host Almanac.

When that temp contract ran out, I was shuffled into other jobs as vacancies demanded – program assistant for Vicki Gabereau for a year, music programmer for a few shows, and even picking up freelance production work on weekends. But the one area of CBC Vancouver where I was assigned the most was the record library.

While the work in the library could be tedious and wearisome (lots of data entry and re-shelving), it was also one of the most stimulating parts of the building. The library was a salon of sorts. Production staff from a wide variety of shows, from current affairs to pop to classical to news, would randomly flit in and out of the library, roping us into a wide gamut of conversations. There'd be the Afternoon Show producer who'd come down and say, "We're interviewing a UFOlogist, so, can you think of any good songs about flying saucers?" Or the news guy who practically busts the door down in a panic: "Jim Henson just died. Where are the muppet records!?" And the languid Gabereau music guy who never needed any help, because the show was pre-taped and no one was in a panic there.

The library was the heart of CBC Radio. It was our community centre, our church, our confessional. It wasn't where the shows were made, it wasn't where the action happened, but it was the only place in the building that brought everyone together, and always in random, serendipitous ways. When someone had something to get off their chest, whether office politics, world affairs, union politics or just a bit of gossip, it was we librarians (and whoever else was in earshot) who became their sounding boards.

And there was music around. Always. Whether it was a producer skimming tracks in a listening booth, or head librarian Judy sampling the programming in her office, or soon-to-be-head librarian Johnny pulling out an old easy-listening record at the end of the day, this library was not a shhhhhh zone.

Fast forward through 15 years. I'm laid off due to deep government cuts. I land work with Health Canada and become the accidental medical case manager (work I never imagined doing, let alone being good at, but it broadened my mind while paying the bills). Ten years after that, an itch to get back into media and do some travelling found me working as a magazine editor in China and Singapore, with a brief stint studying in Taipei.

You'd think that with all that life experience, now being in my 40s, I would have put the CBC of my 20s well into my past. But there was something about the place that always called me back. During my work for the feds, I freelanced on-air for the occasional pop-music show. When the feds went on strike a couple of times, I found some work back in the library covering for holidays. When I came back for the Olympics between jobs in Singapore, I got a couple of days of grunt work for some of the live special programming. I could have thought, “Magazine editor, overseas resident … why am I running to Staples to buy Jian Ghomeshi coloured file folders?” Because I never, ever got over that CBC feeling from when I was 21. The CBC still felt, as it always had, like a very egalitarian place, where people (for the most part) worked collectively on projects they were proud of, and less like a hierarchy of individuals.

When I returned from Singapore for good in 2011, word got out that I was looking for work, and Johnny (now the lone librarian after several years of cuts chipped away at the large staff) called me up with an assignment. The good news – he needed someone in the record library for a few weeks. The bad news – the job entailed dismantling the collection of records and CDs, and archiving the valuables before auctioning the rest of it off.

These few weeks were full of emotions surreal, beautiful, sad, and poignant. From the time I left the CBC at age 29 to being called back at age 45, I was certainly a changed person. Not just more mature and with enhanced skills, but having been both scarred and bettered by new careers and exposure to different parts of the world. This part of my past should have been well behind me. Coming back to work amongst the stacks of records and compact discs, doing the work of my youth – it should have felt like one grand backward step. Instead, it felt otherworldly. This institution was deeply embedded into my identity, seamlessly flowing through childhood, my student years, and my working life. Of course it was devastating to see the library taken to pieces, just as most of the CBC building on Hamilton Street had been transformed through the years. Yet, no matter how much of a mistake I believed it was to dispose of the library, I'm glad I was back for its final days.

How much this place, this room, had haunted me. Stepping back into it, after all I had been through in my life, was almost illusory. There was my handwriting still on the signs and shelf-tagging. The desk, a bulky thing probably handmade by the TV stagecraft department, still had all the same scratches and pen marks indelibly etched into it. The chairs hadn't been replaced. The clutter in the drawers and cubby-holes hadn't changed. The same tattered recycling box was still under the desk. Funny how things like scrapes or dents or recycling boxes are not meant to make any impression whatsoever, but the memories that come back when you see them again after 20 years! Even the phone still had my voice on the outgoing message, back from the day in the early 90s when voicemail came to the building.

A couple of my friends in Singapore responded to my Facebook posts that I was demeaning myself by doing menial labour, or "janitor" work, as one of them put it. Of course, they knew me as the well-off magazine editor. Now they were seeing me sitting on the floor, sorting through stacks of musty records. But their comments only underlined the reasons why I left that country. The Singapore work culture is ruled by kiasu, a local term that roughly means "fear of losing face". Meaning, if you're a professional, you're not caught dead doing minor tasks or manual labour best left for a secretary or cleaner. For instance, going for lunch with sales staff at one magazine I worked for, we could not find an empty table at the food court, except for one cluttered with dirty dishes. To their horror, I picked up the dishes and wiped the table with a napkin. "Don't do that!" one of them said. "Let's find another spot," said another. Although we ended up with a clean table without waiting, one colleague said I had made a spectacle by doing "the uncle's work". That's just one of many illustrative stories of kiasu that I came home with.

I was not the only former employee to be brought back for the library project. Two retired producers were also brought on board for their expertise, both of them well-regarded not just at the CBC, but in the local arts community. So here we all were: a former librarian, one of the city's top recording engineers, and a respected jazz producer, all using our respective expertise in pop, classical and jazz to select prime specimens for archiving, mucking about in stacks of records and having a blast. This is how my work abroad enhanced my appreciation for life in Vancouver – I was now back in a place where I didn't have to fear for my social status based on the job I did or how I appeared to others. Sitting on the floor of the library, rummaging through old records, not only was I happy to be back "home" in the CBC, but I was also relieved to be amongst familiar colleagues who could be both professional and laidback.

Our jobs required us to look at every single record on the shelves, a collection going back to the early 1960s. You can imagine, all of us music lovers, finding massive distractions amongst our work. I ended up volunteering a few hours or days here and there to make up for the time spent listening to weird discoveries in one of the listening booths.

All of us who worked on this sad project lamented the mistake of disposing of such a massive library, yet our attitude was: "If it's a done deal, then glad we're the ones doing it." On the one hand, I could see the corporation's reasons. With so much of the library's contents digitized and accessible to studios across the country on their Virtual Music Library, the physical libraries were becoming largely redundant. On the other hand, it was only the compact discs, dating back to about 1990 or so, that had been ripped into the VML. It wouldn't have cost the corp much to have a librarian spend a year digitizing some of the rare vinyl. Instead it was boxed up and shipped to CBC Toronto, where, we surmised, the collection might likely sit untouched for several years.

The value of this "redundant" library was underscored while I was boxing up a stash of local discs by Vancouver bands. There was some labour trouble brewing in our transit service, and a producer came down looking for a particular song he remembered about a bus strike in the 1980s. A few North Vancouver kids had released a single called "Stranded in the Park", sung to the tune of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark". (Flip side: "Born in North Van".) I just happened to have that single by Boss and the Bandits in pile in a listening booth, after having given it a spin myself. The occasion prompted one technician to grab some of the collection and digitize it himself before our local treasures ended up in an inaccessible box a few thousand miles away.

The items we selected to save barely scratched the surface of the entire library. When we finished our project, the reason for the corp's haste became apparent – after the collection was auctioned off to the highest bidder, the library was converted to retail space. When the CBC Vancouver “bunker” was built in 1971, it was on the far outskirts of downtown, where there was no demand for real estate. Today, it's on the edge of trendy Yaletown, and every part of the building that can be sold off or rented out has been converted and parceled out. The parking lot is now a condo called TV Towers. The library was just the latest casualty. One day soon, I suspect, as programming continues to get cut and become centralized in Toronto, the entire building will be gone.

But where the parking lot was not missed – nor the plaza that became a sandwich shop, nor the cafeteria replaced by private offices – the library was the unofficial heart of the radio operation. Now that it's gone, I can finally put the CBC behind me. While I would go back if I had a chance, I no longer feel any calling or attachment to the place.

After all the transformations made to the building and the culture of CBC Vancouver, the loss of the record library is the last straw that renders the place unrecognizable to me.

The pen and where the buck stops

Every journalist knows to do a bit of research before heading out on the beat and covering a story. My shortcoming as a magazine writer was not doing my research on the industry I was getting into before delving into it. I knew well enough that it was advertisers who paid the piper, but I was naïve about the little bones that publishers would throw to their patrons.

Depending on the magazine and its own ethics, some of those bones would be small and insignificant (say, a product mention in the tech pages), or they could be quite large and meaty (a two-page article extolling the quality service at a dental clinic in exchange for a free emergency root-canal, which actually happened at one place I worked). I was aware that many magazines operated this way. Where I was oblivious was in thinking that there were many other publications that didn't scratch the backs of its advertisers in one way or another.

Much of this back-scratching happens in those "About Town"-type of items you see in the front of publications – 100-word blurbs about celebrity sightings or interesting factoids that don't warrant a full-blown story. This is where even the most ethical of magazines usually spit their loads after servicing their paymasters. For instance, that photo of J.K. Rowling at a book fair sponsored by Borders isn't really a celebrity sighting, but a little sucking up to the book chain, which is a "preferred advertiser".

I was fortunate enough to do my internship at that's Shanghai magazine, which, at the time, kept a firm line between advertisers and content. But even they had their "about town" pages, and one of my first assignments was to head into the city for a cocktails event one night.

This is what I filed:

City Scene

Caran d’Ache product launch party

146 Words

When the invitation for the Caran d'Ache product launch at the Shanghai Concert Hall landed on our desk, we were intrigued. If we hadn't known that Caran was the Swiss producer of absurdly expensive pens for those who wouldn't be caught dead with a Bic, we might have assumed they were watchsmiths. It was that vague.

We showed up for the mystery event promptly at 7:30 and were treated to an empty, flood-lit runway for 50 minutes. We passed the time wondering, how do you launch a pen on a runway? Finally, three sumptuous models took the stage to play air-violins to loungy classical chill-out tunes.

After their little dance-and-dash, we were again left with an empty runway and cocktails. Ten minutes passed before our curiosity was snuffed and we decided it was time to go. Life’s too short, and after all, it's just a pen.

Needless to say, my snide little masterpiece was not printed. It's worth noting, though, that it passed in silence and I continued to get assignments. I would have been fired had I filed that kind of piece with the Singapore magazine I worked for the following year. Although I had wised up somewhat, I found my non-consumerist mindset to be my Achilles heel in the magazine business. When I edited my company's annual Travel Guide in Singapore, I was tickled that the weak economy prevented the sales team from lining up enough advertisers to turn a profit for the publication. With hardly any ads, I got to stuff the glossy journal full of articles and photos with wanton abandon, and there were no PR hacks on my case to cut the Cambodia article in half so they could paste in an ad for diet pills. It was a dream come true – Conde Nast meets Foreign Affairs.

I sense now that my overall nonchalance toward the people who made my paycheque possible is what spoiled my relationship with that publisher, who ran the company's magazines like advertising catalogues. It was not my job to sell ad space, of course, but my indifference must have been palpable. The previous year, I had written an article about Singapore's cycling culture and quoted a bike-shop manager as part of my research. During that issue's post mortem, the editor questioned why I was giving free publicity to a non-advertiser. Perhaps if I had said, "Sorry, next time I'll check with sales first," that would have smoothed things over. What I did say – "I was just trying to write a good article" (with a shrug of the shoulders and face that probably combined puzzlement with disgust) – set me up for harsher consequences when my naïveté stirred trouble.

My aversion to advertising probably stems from spending my formative working-years at CBC Radio from age 21 to 29. When media is unmolested by the agenda of advertising dollars, its power to bring communities together and stimulate meaningful dialogue is unparalleled. Once you're a part of it, you never forget it. So when I had the chance to shape the content of my own magazines, my only goal was to make them as stimulating and interesting as possible. By the time I was working in Singapore, my ethic was so embedded that I had blinders on. Not only was this my first time working in private media, but also a first for me to be in non-union environments. Combined with the lack of labour laws and the different ways of doing things in a new land, these were more significant elements of culture shock than dealing with day-to-day minutiae in a foreign country.

Back to that's Shanghai. After my little disaster with the pen company, the section editor sent me on another City Scene mission, this time for a TV network. She gave me some gentle counsel: "Be nice to these people. They’re connected with the government."

The event was in a little tea-house, where a table setting had a card with my name on it … and a delicate red envelope containing three 100-yuan bills. Perhaps I’m the type of person who needs things spelled out for me, because, reminiscing on this particular instance, the little bribe made this bit of marketing feel so effortless. I even enjoyed making up the quotes!