“Have I told you the story of how I got into CBC?”

My friend Dave tells the great story of how he started at the CBC. He begins:

Have I told you the story of how I got into CBC? It’s ridiculous.

I was a CBC Radio listener in my late teens and early 20s. In June of 2000, I was listening to our local morning show host … introduce a contest they were running for Canada Day. He asked listeners to write a parody of a famous Canadian song. The best would win two first class train tickets to Ottawa for Canada Day, VIP passes to all the shows on Parliament Hill, and three nights stay at a hotel downtown.

Like many great “how I ended up” stories, it’s a topsy-turvy path of bravery, skill, and creating the necessary preconditions for luck.

I’ve had a similar journey.

If my mother’s college friend Heather hadn’t mentioned to me that a Victoria College professor was looking for volunteers to help enter Greek texts into a database?

If my high school biology teacher hadn’t taken us on a field trip to the Vertebrate Palaeontology lab at the Royal Ontario Museum, where they happened to need a FORTRAN programmer?

If my former Trent University professor hadn’t given me an office with a terminal that let me use the World Wide Web months after it was released?

If I hadn’t come across a copy of The Guardian in a Toronto library and found an ad for a job on PEI?

Every twisty turn was a doorway.

Every twisty turn involved help from others, enormous privilege, luck.

(My own story of “getting into the CBC”:  through Marg Meikle, I met Ann Thurlow. Ann took care of the rest.)