Amateur not Amateurish – Dealing with Failure this Week

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This week’s Amateur Traveler episode was almost ready. The interview was done, the edit was finished, the chapters and pictures had been added, 3 news stories had been recorded, the intro and exit music were in place. All that was left was to listen to the show one more time so I could write a description of the show. That’s where things went wrong.

The show sounded like crap.

I don’t mean that the show was uninteresting. My guest Michael Soncina was a repeat guest and the country of Tajikistan was certainly interesting. Do you know where the name comes from? I do now. But something had gone very wrong with the audio quality of the show. I am breaking in a new editor and he had no reason to think that I would send him a sound file that I didn’t plan to use, but apparently I had not listened to the audio long enough before I sent it.

I was going to have to scrap this week’s show right before the finish line. This was particularly frustrating as Michael is trying to raise money to present his experiences at an ecotourism conference in California and raise awareness of sustainable travel in Central Asia. (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/189388 if you want to help Michael). And of course it was my mistake so I still have to pay my editor and then throw away his work.

I am the guy yelling at his iPhone when an NPR podcast, or someone else who should know better, releases a show I can’t listen to in the car because I can’t hear it. I have become a bit of a perfection ist. When I named the show Amateur Traveler I meant someone who travels for the love of it, not Amatuerish Traveler.

But I have standards for what I want the show to sound like of the site to look like. My theory is that someone new will listen to each show, or someone new will read every blog post. You only get one chance to make a first impression.

So my apologies. I screwed up this week. but I did not want to subject you to my mistake. Michael and I will rerecord when we can find the time and we will do this all over again, but better.