There was an email this morning at work about an event today in the Teague Auditorium featuring the new NASA Administrator speaking live across the NASA sites.

In 1980, I was an intern at NASA working with Taft Communications, which was a contractor for NASA's Television and AV systems. One day, a concert was being set up for John Denver at Teague Auditorium, and a co-worker and I stopped by to see what was going on. We both had long-range radios to communicate with others on our team. I saw the sound guy setting up the mixer, so I wanted to go over to see what he had. The audio mixer was a large Sony board that had many VU meters all across the top of the board. In those days, you had to calibrate the meters by sending tone through the board to zero out the meters. The audio guy was almost finished zeroing his meters when I got the bright idea of keying the mic on my radio. When I did that, all the meters pegged and lost their calibration due to the strong RF interference. The audio guy cussed, then started re-calibrating the meters. He was almost finished when I keyed the mic again. The audio guy wasn't having a good day, and my coworker grinned because he'd figured out what I had done. As the audio guy started calibrating the meters again, my co-worker shook his head to tell me not to key the mic again.

After we left the area, we both laughed about that poor audio guy trying to set up his board, and he had no idea that I was causing his meters to go nuts.

I had not thought of that in 40 years! Funny how when I saw the name of the auditorium, that memory popped up in my mind.