Look Ma, I'm On TV!

I recently had the opportunity to support Overture's high school musical theater program by serving as a volunteer operator on a Wisconsin Public Television pledge drive. The program that night was Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, and in the intervals, the old-fashioned push-button phones (with actual receivers and cords) would sound their alarms and we would begin the process of taking pledges, using a rather antiquated DOS blue screen/gold writing/advance-only computer system (as you can see in the screen-shot below, most of us are squinting and looking slightly befuddled). Hehe! I seemed to get all the over-complicated questions like "I'm already a sustaining member but I just called in a pledge because I WANT THAT CD/DVD SET but can you reverse that and just send me the CD?" The volunteer and paid staff were all wonderful and it was thrilling to be in the studio live and to watch the presenters and crew do their thing. Definitely a first-time experience that warrants repeating.