Thompson: The Fork in the Road

As a teenager in Thompson, Manitoba, I was offered a career as a broadcast engineer, and I turned it down. This is a story about how that decision got made. It’s also a story about Irv.

Who offered me the job, and why?

Jerry the broadcast engineer sat across from me with his manager from Winnipeg, and the two of them were adamant. Engineers made more money than anyone else in the company. They’d send me to Winnipeg for training. I’d come back and work alongside Jerry. The job was mine if I wanted it.

I said no.

I’d been laid off two weeks earlier from the only job I’d ever had. A three-women-strong staff revolt had just forced management to bring me this offer. My father back in Alberta said take it. And I said no.

But first — Thompson.

Why would a sheltered kid end up in Thompson?

My first job out of high school was in the northern Manitoba city of Thompson. Canadians nicknamed Winnipeg, Thompson’s neighbour to the south, Winterpeg. Trust me — Winterpeg is balmy compared to Thompson.

Why would a sheltered kid from a conservative Christian background end up there? Because a minister had come through town raising awareness and funds for a church, and it sounded perfect to me. A place that needed help. A place where the work was real. What I didn’t know yet was that Thompson was also a place where the police barred all but one door of the hotel when a fight broke out — if you could find your way out, you weren’t arrested.

WKRP in Cincinnati might as well have been a documentary about Thompson radio and TV. The staff came from one of two camps: the young starting out, looking for any experience they could get, and the older ones looking for a place to hide. The man who hired me, Don, was an excellent on-air broadcaster and probably the most capable manager in the building. Almost everyone there was either passing through on the way up or hiding out from something on the way down.

Who was Irv?

My immediate supervisor was neither. Irv was a former lineman, three times as strong as I was and a full head shorter. Over forty, which I figured meant I should be able to keep up with him.

I could not keep up with him.

While I was training, the company couldn’t provide two sets of belts and spurs, so I got them, and Irv would climb hand over hand up the guy wire to join me at the top of the pole and talk me through whatever I was doing. He’d beat me up the pole and beat me down. Later, when we finally had two sets of equipment, he’d drop his helmet and race the tumbling helmet to the ground.

I strapped on belt and spurs once when I was over forty myself, just to see, and was shocked at how much leg strength the work demanded — how quickly my legs started shaking, how fast I had to come down before I fell down. Irv was over forty, doing it all day in -40, and waiting for me at the top.

When you worked with Irv, you worked nonstop, fast as you could go, or else. Once you were off, you played as hard as you could for as long as you could. Living and working like that, the cold wasn’t a factor. If we weren’t tearing up the Thompson River on snowmobiles, the crew was hard partying with friends. I wasn’t a partier and I wasn’t a drinker, but that was no excuse to miss the fun. Irv told his wife I was a nice kid who wouldn’t say shit if my mouth was full of it. According to her, he respected that I stood by my choices, and he never once said a word to me about them either way. What he did make plain was that not keeping up was not an option.

That was Thompson. That was the life. And then Ron came back.

How did I lose the job — and nearly get a better one?

Ron was the man I’d replaced. He’d been away when I got hired, and the job was mine until he came back. That was always the deal; they just hadn’t put it in the fine print. The day he returned, the station hired him back. Both the general manager and Ron himself sat me down. “You’ve been fine, kid. But I’m back now.”

Two weeks’ notice. Polite. Fair, by the standards of a town where the labour pool was thin. I called my dad. He needed help at home anyway. I told him I’d come back to Alberta.

What I didn’t know until later was that three women at the station weren’t having it. Two were front-line office staff. The third was a cable subscription salesperson I barely knew. I have no idea what they said to management, but they pushed hard enough that someone listened. My job, apparently, was to keep blushing every time they said something to embarrass me, which my upbringing made effortless. My face betrayed me every time, and they loved it.

Looking back from 2026, an HR department would have plenty to say about how those three women treated me. They’d be right, by today’s standards. But standards aren’t the only thing that travels across fifty years. Intent does too. They were giving a sheltered kid lessons his upbringing had skipped, in the only language the room spoke.

The blushing was the cost of admission. The advocacy was the proof that I’d paid it.

I never thanked them. Until today it didn’t register how far out of their way they’d gone. I don’t know if any of them are still alive. If by some chance one of them or their family ever sees this — thank you. You didn’t owe me anything. You did it anyway.

Why did I say no?

I told Jerry I’d think about it. Then I went and told Irv.

Irv had no patience for the idea. An engineer wasn’t a lineman. An engineer wasn’t someone he’d hang out with. If I took that job, I wasn’t part of the crew anymore. He didn’t have to say more. The work-hard-play-hard world I’d been hauling myself up poles to belong to had a door, and that door was about to close behind me.

What mattered was that the man I’d been trying to keep up with for the better part of a year was telling me I’d be on the outside of something I’d just barely earned my way into.

Then I called my dad. He said take it. He could manage. He wanted me to take it.

I said no. I’d made up my mind before the offer ever came, and once I make up my mind it’s hard for me — or anyone else — to talk me out of it. Not Jerry. Not the manager from Winnipeg. Not the three women whose names I’m ashamed I can’t all remember. Not even my father, the one person whose advice I should probably have weighed the heaviest.

So I went home.

What did the road not taken cost?

The road not taken was real. Broadcast engineers who came up through that pathway in the 1970s built careers that ran straight through to the digital transition, with pensions and stability. I’d have been good at it. Jerry was offering me a life.

I said no for two reasons that didn’t deserve equal weight. One was a man I admired refusing to follow me into a different room. The other was a father who needed me — even though he was telling me not to come.

I went back to Alberta and I became a technician. It’s all I’ve ever been, but that sentence undersells it. Fifty-plus years of service calls. The kind of pattern recognition that only comes from putting your hands on the same kinds of failures over and over until you can hear them coming through the phone.

The road I took built something specific. The road I didn’t take would have built something else. I don’t think either would have built the other. Two different lives. I picked one. Over and over again, I am still picking it.