I’ve recently been thinking about one of my past jobs—one from about 5 years ago, when I was young, stupid, overworked and underpaid. It was actually my first “real” job on my own … and probably also the best ice-breaker I have on my résumé. Before that, I’d been living at home and working part-time at a movie theater, part-time as a piano teacher, with maybe some writing on the side. Oh, and I’d also been working full-time at a messaging center, an experience about which I keep forgetting because it was so deadly dull.

But anyway, I used to coordinate the closed captioning of the news shows on CNN, CNNSI, KABC, and KCAL (the last two are TV stations local to Los Angeles).

For those of you in the dark, closed captioning is that bit of white text on a black background that you see either at the top or at the bottom of the television screen—subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing, or for those who like the mute button.

And yes, I used to broadcast the closed captioning live on TV.

It was a fairly easy job, mentally. My task was to dial into the pertinent news network’s computers, download the script that the anchors and/or reporters would read, edit it for public viewing, and broadcast it live, line by line. The only snag was that the task was time-critical; the news writers often didn’t have script ready until about five minutes to the show, and I’d end up running around from one computer station to another, zipping through the basic DOS text editor with my fingers flying over the keyboard and my eyes scanning the copy. Then, when there wasn’t any script (like for live interviews), I’d switch the broadcast part of it to the captioner doing that show.

Now, the captioners … they had the hard part. Captioners are actually court reporters. They use the same basic tools that court reporters do, the primary one being the funny little typewriter that I soon learned is based on phonetic sounds, not letters. The big difference between the captioner and the court reporter, however, is that the captioner’s work is seen live.

And woe to the captioner who is not prepared for a show.

Because their little “typewriter” is based on phonetic sounds, captioners need to have a dictionary prepared so that the nonsense code they type in actually get turned into words that the average person can read. More than likely, they will have everyday words like “the,” “day,” “man”, and “book.” But if the show they’re going to caption is hosted by Joie Chen, then they’d better have Joie Chen’s name put into their dictionary with the phonetic code that they’ve made up for her, or it may come out as Joey chin (if it even comes out as anything intelligible).

So the other half of my job was to prepare the captioner for the upcoming show. I’d create a rundown based on the information I downloaded, which included the anchors’ and reporters’ names and the stories they’d cover—names of politicians, celebrities, geographical locations, medicines, buildings, titles, etc. For shows like Larry King Live, where we couldn’t predict the topics that might be discussed, I’d research as much as I can on the day’s guest and get as many unusual names and places that would have anything to do with the person—family, friends, colleagues, movies or shows they were in, organizations they sponsor, etc. Whatever information I was able to get I gave to the captioner to put into her dictionary.

It was altogether pretty darn cool. Or at least I think so. I’ve never yet met a person who found this out about me without a slack jaw and an open mouth that would later say, “Wow. That’s so cool.”

One would almost think that I told them I worked on the Manhattan Project or something, and looking back on it now, it kind of feels as though I did.

I used to coordinate the closed captioning on CNN.

Wow. That’s so cool.

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