The Adventures of Almigo

INTRODUCING...

Hi, my names Almigo (okay it’s really Al Shield like the cover says but I enjoy the nickname just the same). And if this was a wrestling event then the ring announcer would probably announce that I wasn’t very tall (compared to your average wrestler), not heavy at all (compared to your average wrestler) and hailed from a part of Melbourne Australia known as Richmond (again, not usually noted as where many wrestlers hail from so this wrestling announcer introduction is off to a bad start already.)

That’s where the dreams of being a pilot flying supersonic jets and saving the world started and had I actually been semi decent at maths during my school years, then in all honesty I probably...wouldn’t have ended up as a pilot anyway.

(A commercial pilot possibly if I worked hard enough but definitely not the next G.I. Joe.)

I can only attribute this to my dad’s love of aviation somehow as we definitely didn’t have any pilots in the family (but we did have an impressive mix of careers though – a couple of artists, lecturers, a journalist, librarian and editor, pharmacists, doctor of mathematics and nowadays a doctor and an insanely talented designer just to name a couple.) 

No the plan was to become a print media journalist in a vague semblance of what my father did for a crust (he was a great wine and spirits journalist, however I never figured what kind of journo I wanted to be).

It was a great plan.

However once again my lack of focus during my education didn’t help there either as I emerged from high school with quite good numbers in both media studies and Indonesian but average schools in pretty much everything else.

Apparently knowing how to say The cat is on top of the spider and Hey lets go to the Olympic swimming pool in Indonesian isn’t impressive enough to be accepted into a university course for budding journalists, not even ones based in Indonesia near any Olympian training grounds. 

So with most of the journalist courses out of reach and still having the hankering to get into media somewhere, anywhere at all, I followed my mum’s advice and enrolled in a general media Tafe course that exposed students to the possibilities that were out there. And so during the year I worked with some truly nutty film crews, some incredibly vain trainee actors, wrote some awful ads for radio and print, worked both in front and behind a camera and at the end of it decided that I wasn’t fond of the camera (and vice versa) and the part of the course that I truly enjoyed was the radio section. So with a recommendation from my lecturer and a couple of favours from media friends of my father I made it into a notoriously difficult to get into radio course and spent the next year learning how to make myself irreplaceable and how in every radio station the importance of treating the engineers like gods (this is very sound advice because if they don’t like you they won’t come running when something goes wrong..)

At the end of the course I took odd jobs for extra cash while waiting for the big opportunity came up. I worked in a box factory, pretended I knew what I was talking about when selling art at a pop up gallery, recorded up people during a voice over class, ran around with no idea as a courier, sold newspapers and magazines on Saturdays and served some very snooty people as a catering assistant. All while waiting for that one call to say...

Almigo, this is a radio station. Glory and vast fortune awaits thee, come and work for us!

The call eventually did happen (without the vast fortune or glory part of course – I’m still waiting for those) and I packed up my kit and caboodle, my box and dice, my bat and ball and my bed and beer fridge and moved three and a half hours away from friends and family to write radio ads for snobby local hairdressers and commercials for frozen packs of bull sperm, while pre-recording a midnight to dawn generic radio show that would only be heard by taxi drivers and bored security guards.

That was roughly seventeen years ago (give or take a few months) and since then I haven’t looked back. And while there was a lot of talk during my difficult to get into radio course about making a five year plan that involved starting in a small radio station in the middle of nowhere and joining the bright lights of a big city within five years, I found myself enjoying the adventures a little too much to be pinned down by such a narrowly focused plan. I got to interview some of my idols, play some of my favourite songs of all time and occasionally when the shit hit the fan with natural disasters I helped inform the town where not to tread. I made amazing friends and relationships, bought a house, got married, became a dad. I learnt basic mechanics and enough DIY skills to not burn my back shed down and through all of this there was no burning desire to race the city to finish the plan.

However while the fun journey across the last seventeen years has lead me across seven radio stations and a national network across Australia, the more I got into the wonderful world of radio announcing, the more I discovered that there was some kind of gravitational pull building. Like I had some kind of strange power..

No not those amazing abilities out of the X-Men movies (if I could pop razor sharp claws out of my fists ala Wolverine than I’d probably just end up using them for cutting up ingredients for dinner), more a subconscious magnetic ability with no off switch that would attract the strangest people and adventures my way.

Without a pompous scientific name let’s instead just call it ‘The random adventure magnet’ that led to many a weird, wacky, occasionally confusing, sometimes unwanted, completely random time when I would often wonder aloud:

‘Exactly how did I get here?’

Hence the subtitle of this book – One man, no plan and all the adventures along the way. If I had attempted to plan half the things myself that have happened during my career behind the wireless then things wouldn’t have been half as exciting in reality nor worth writing about. (And as you’ll read about soon enough, who goes out and plans to injure themselves with stunts as much as I have?). So many strange adventures, so little time.

A prime example of this was the time a bathtub appeared in the back car park at work and I suddenly had to become a cockroach commentator . While it wasn’t the first strange adventure on my plate, it certainly was one of the most bizarre..

CHAPTER ONE - COCKROACH COMMENTATOR

So...exactly how did I get here?

One afternoon I helped pour 200 cockroaches of various sizes over a woman in wetsuit in a bathtub.

Now while it sounds like some bizarre foreign movie shown very late at night with barely legible subtitles and a shaky storyline (or one hell of a way to get your kicks), it was actually part of this local woman's entry to try and win tickets in a national competition to see the V8 Supercars at Bathurst. Or as we called it around the office ‘Another day in radio.’

Yes that’s correct - she said she'd willingly bathe in a sea of god-awful cockroaches for the chance to win tickets to a motor sport event. Picture the hysterics in your own house when someone gets surprised from a nasty cockroach racing from one side of the kitchen to the other (let alone one of the disgusting little beasties brushing against your skin) and multiply that level of anxiousness by a couple of hundred - in a place you’d least want to encounter one - in a relaxing bath. And since it was a radio competition and we're a radio station, it was up to us to supply the tub, the roaches and commentate while all the hissing, squirming, screaming cockroach action was happening.

You can just picture the army of raised eyebrows when that email went around the office. 

You can also imagine the part of me that thought ‘All those job applications to try and nail a gig in radio, all those longs nights, early starts, weekend work and years of experience in the industry, working with some of the most talented people around and inspiring to the be the king of the radio castle and look where it’s taken you...you’re now pouring cockroaches all over a woman in a bathtub at the back of your work...’

Incredibly it wasn't that hard to source those things in the space of one afternoon (it truly is amazing what you can find for sale around this town). Before you could say ‘Kim (that was her name), why did you think this was a good idea?’ a bathtub was lined up out the back of the station and the promotions team were armed with more than a few boxes of fresh cockroaches from the nearest pet store. Somewhere out there was someone’s pet praying mantis going hungry for Kim’s chance to see some snarling V8’s race furiously around the Bathurst race track. The bathtub was a leftover from a recent renovation which was very lucky as we didn’t think it was possible to borrow one from the nearest bathroom store for the purpose of a Cockroach bath – "Don’t worry, we’ll clean it before you put it back on display!’

As for the idea of a cockroach shower itself? Well that was all Kim the contestants doing. The challenge was to offer to do something truly amazing and different for the chance to win, and her concept impressed the afternoon radio show so much that they agreed - if she went through the insect bath, she’d get to go to Bathurst. And so on that sunny afternoon (a great day for