I still have occasional, not always good, dreams about those days. One dream theme involves either misloading the camera so the film doesn't advance, or going out on an assignment and running out of film or messing up during film processing.
I never particularly enjoyed darkroom work, especially printing color. Yes, there was some "magic" in watching a latent image appear on a piece of paper in the developer tray, but that got old pretty fast. With Photoshop, we're not bothered by chemical-induced dermatitis, nor do our clothes reek of fixer or have impossible to remove developer stains.
An additional advantage of the synthesized scanners was the ease in setting up a radio for a special event. In the xtal scanner days, you had to open up the scanner to change the xtals (and also unmount it if it was installed in a vehicle). Synthesized scanners gave us the luxury of changing channels with the flick of a group of switches (in the case of the 101) or simply entering the frequency with a calculator-like keypad (on the 210 and successive models).
The BC-250 had a massive 50-channell capacity in five banks of 10 channels. VHF Low/High, Civil Airband and UHF. Downside was, in mobile use, the radio was susceptible to losing the program if there was a power surge when starting the car,.
Our company cars were the best benefit. Fourunately, we had a company garage and gas pump, or (later) contracted with local repair shops and gas stations.
Yep mirror like existence, tough bosses, I eventually just reported to the publisher, you're only as good as your last photo LOL, used an old roll of film buried in an old bag sitting in the hot trunk for 2 months once when I ran out of film, came out okay in black and white. We used a Wing Lynch processor. Kodak Extapress was good for a while especially the 800 speed you could push to 1600 but like everybody else we moved over to Fuji just because of the volume we used and the price was cheaper.
All Pros had the same nightmares, missing the big shot when everybody else got it, eating crow when you had to go to a freelancer you didn't like and buy his garbage. We did have the AP Leaf desk before we got Photoshop 4.0 in our Mac's. As you know with color processing and printing we had to be in the total dark but we use that reflective tape, biggest fear was smoking a full box of color paper.
BC 250 was a monster of a scanner, loved it, also loved my company car, it was a Lumina with a V8 but each car had its own phone number which was a pain.. my car had Philadelphia police and NJSP press parking stickers.. also had the pp plates which I know California has also.
We of course had a garage for the delivery trucks and company cars and our own gas pump.
When I officially became a boss I had the option of leasing a car, they put the lease expense in my untaxed expense check and all mileage, not just on the job but all my mileage since my job was 24/7 went on the expense account, about $600 a month with the lease payment not taxed. I would buy my own gas then and get paid for it. Always got approved as I was the one that approved expense reports LOL.
My dad was an engineer in tool and die but also an auto mechanic so that took care of itself.
That truly was a different time and really the best times of my life, although I had slide rule dial tunables in my cars, eventually a handful of Crystal control scanners made life so easy and simple.
Again in those days everything was easy and simple as opposed to today, I can't honestly say it's better today than it was then.
Don't get me wrong, the SDS radios are great machines but the one thing I really need to listen to, I can't.
