The last video I made in D.C. was a video for Lerner New York. During the shoot at Springfield Mall, I made the acquaintance of a very nice girl named Susan. She lived in midtown Manhattan and we had already started a long distance relationship. On my next visit, I started looking for a place to live and found one in what is known as the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan’s east side. It was an elegant, one bedroom apartment on the second floor of a building located on 49th street and first avenue. When I looked out my window, I could see the UN building as plain as day. The apartment was a lot more than I could afford but I was confident I would find a good job once I got settled. Susan had some contacts at Court-TV and made an introduction, but I didn’t want to go back to being a Techie, so I kept looking. I started pounding out resumes and received one rejection after another. The experience I had acquired in Washington, D.C.didn’t transfer to New York as I had hoped. To make ends meet, I started working at night for a video duplication facility copying U-Matic, Betacam and one inch reels of programs. I’d walk 20 blocks to the facility at 7:00 p.m. and get there around 7:30 p.m. My shift was over at 4:00 a.m., so I’d come home and try to get some rest. It was brutal adjusting to a night schedule but after a few weeks, it got easier. There was only one or two other people at the duplication facility doing late night hours and we had a quota of work that had to get done by the end of our shift. I dreamed there would be at least one night when things were a little slower so I could get some rest but there was absolutely never any downtime. The machine room was cold as ice and I hated that more than anything else. I could deal with the cold outside, but that ice-cold refrigerated air blowing in your face all night long was hard to take. I persevered until I found something better.

That something else was a job working for Major League Baseball which I was very excited about. They hired me over the phone after getting one of my resumes and told me to report to work a few days afterwards. Major League Baseball, wow what could be better than that I thought.

As a lifelong Baltimore Oriole follower, I was a huge fan. I read the Sporting News reports about the team, followed the trades, tracked their play during spring training, checked the box scores every morning, and could tell you who had the best on base percentages, most hits, RBI’s, Home Runs, lowest ERA, etc., etc. Then the details of the new job emerged, and they were not what I had hoped for. The first problem was that I had to take a bus to Hackensack, N.J. Hackensack was on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, the marshy wetlands where mobsters disposed of anyone who got in their way. But even worse, the only place to get the bus to Hackensack was the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The Port Authority was known, the world over for its extra seediness. The rent on my apartment was killing me so I walked every chance I could to get to the Port Authority terminal. I walked all the way from my apartment on the east side of town, (almost as far east as one could be), and then walk to the completely opposite end of town. To get to the Port Authority, that meant a walk from 1st Avenue on the east side to 8th avenue on the west side, then down 9 blocks to 40 the street twice a day. Since I agreed to take the job, I made the trek. Once again, I would be working the night shift so I would walk across midtown, arrive by 7:00 p.m. at the terminal, grab a bus and then walk from the bus stop to MLB’s building, arriving at 8:00 p.m. I worked for 6 hours and then returned to Manhattan at 3:30 a.m. Finally, a repeat of the same walk to the Port Authority but now in the opposite direction. In the wee hours, I’d keep my head down and walk at a brisk pace past the adult bookstores and throngs of hustlers, call girls and inebriates every night. Was it worth it? My job at MLB involved statistical work which wasn’t too hard. I would watch a live or pre-recorded game on tape and then enter the stats into a computer so the league could track who was doing what each night. As much as I loved baseball, I knew I couldn’t do this very long. Furthermore, when I calculated the cost just to get to work, I was only breaking even when I figured out what my take home pay would be after expenses. Yet, the challenge to maintain this pace, at least for a few weeks while I looked for something else, was kind of exhilarating to the newly anointed New Yorker I had become. I rationalized that at least I was making contacts.

So when all of the jobs I filed with 5 stars didn’t seem to be going anywhere, I started to look for work in complementary businesses that support Video Producers and production companies. That would include, rental camera and lighting companies like Camera Mart, All Mobile Video, NEP, Unitel, and many more. Post Facilities like Betelgeuse Productions, Broadway Video, Moving Pictures, Deluxe, DuArt Film and Video and more. Finally there were the Resellers, the biggest was B&H photo, Adorama, BCS, Band Pro and more. I was invited back to BCS on 9th ave. and 34th street for a second interview and the manager, Richard, called me a few days later to tell me I got the job. It was a 9:00 to 5:00 job and I could take an hour for lunch. They offered a base salary and a decent commission, full medical coverage and vacation pay. I had applied for the engineer position, fixing and maintaining videotape machines and cameras. But that job was already filled so I was being hired for a sales position. Could I do sales, sure I can I thought to myself, wasn’t I already good at booking production jobs back in D.C. How much harder could this be?

As it turned out, I was very good at sales, I started as a Sales Engineer selling individual pieces of gear, and putting together systems for clients looking to build studios and mobile vans. I sold camera packages for news organizations and found solutions for companies that needed one piece or another to fill a specific new job requirement or addressed a technical issue they were having . Some of my clients at that time included, Anderson Productions, a post-facility located a few blocks from ESPN in Bristol, CT and NBC Sports, they ordered six M2 decks for the Olympics and I personally delivered them to Pittsburgh, PA.

BCS had a client ownership database, which impressed the hell out of me. Once you entered a new customer, you had ownership of that client’s records for a minimum of three months and they were then protected within the network from other salespeople calling them. When you made contact, you would then manually enter a note into the company’s notes record and your ownership would refresh for another three months from the time you entered the note. It also left a time and date stamp so you could track chronologically all of your conversations. I had never seen anything quite like this before and it was really incredible to me. Management had designed and implemented its own CRM with specific and unique features specific to the used equipment business. I can’t over emphasize how strategically important this was, there was no such thing as Salesforce back then and no search engines, the more I used the system, the more impressed I became. The strengths and weaknesses became apparent to me over time. If you could think of a new feature that would allow salespeople to work more efficiently, more sales would be closed faster and in time that system would help new people come up to speed faster. The programmer Curt, used open source code and once the basic frame and database were created, he was called upon time and time again to add new features. Curt was a bit of a scatter-brain, and he had other clients so if we had some downtime, the system could be down for days until he fixed the problem. Most of the time, the issues were related to code that wasn’t compiled properly and he often had to retrace his work, line by line. So then the bad news was that we were tethered to Curt for life. You took great care when speaking to him directly, he was brilliant but very sensitive about his work. One other thing to bear in mind andagain, not a small feat. Lou Claude, the owner paid for a dedicated AT&T link between LA and NY as company data could not travel across the public internet at that time. What we had in place was a modem on one end of the country talking to a modem on the ether end. A series of dumb terminals where used to enter data in a text based black and amber GUI. The link was enormously expensive and wonky from time to time, but my goodness, when it worked (about 85% of the time), it was a competition killer. Much respect to Lou and Curt, I took it all in with wide open eyes.

The BCS experience allowed me to earn enough money to eventually buy my own condo on the upper west side of New York. The BCS experience is detailed in the BCS NY and BCS LA sections, here’s the path: Video Technology/BCS NY , Video Technology/BCS LA.