Friday, May 24, 2019

Where "W.P.O.S." came from

In 1999, I was making decent money as a lighting technician in North Hollywood, California. I lived in Huntington Beach, a near 50 mile commute, which sucked, but I liked my job, and I liked the pay.  But I got sidelined by an injury, and could do the heavy lifting the job required anymore.  I decided to try taxi driving, something I could do right in Huntington Beach, and something I thought I could make good money at.  It took a few months to learn the business, partly because taxi driving is a business, not a paycheck job.  I had one good year where I could work weekends, have 4 days off, and pay my bills.  Not the best job ever, but it was fun at times.  

I was a taxi driver in the H.B. area for most of the early 2000's, but didn't realize how technology would change the game.  Long story short, I had to start working 7 days a week, to pay my taxi lease and gas, as more and more taxis were put on the road.  Computer dispatching, a new technology, completely changed the game, like so many other industries.  I worked more and more hours, up to 100 hours a week, and was living in my taxi for years.  It stopped being fun, but if I quit, I lost my "job," my vehicle, and my "home."  Because of that, I couldn't find another way to make a living.  

It finally got so bad I had to just drop off the tax one day, and I became fully homeless with no income at all.  After a year on the streets of Southern California, I took my family's offer of a plane ticket to North Carolina.  My parents, my sister, and I grew up in Ohio, and moved across country, winding up in California when I had just graduated, and my little sister was in high school.  I got a job in SoCal, why they were in the Bay Area.  My dad got a job in North Carolina, and my sister later followed, and finished up college there.  

In November 2008, as the economy was collapsing into the Great Recession, they paid for me to fly to the Piedmont Triad area, in central North Carolina.  I stayed in my parents spare bedroom of their tiny apartment. I couldn't find any job, and lost everything I owned except for a couple changes of clothes.  I got real depressed, but I had their desktop computer in my room.  I'd never had a computer with an internet connection up to that point, I was pretty much a Luddite.  

So after spending a week looking up porn and a few other things that seemed interesting, I started blogging about my days in the BMX industry in the 1980's.  About a month into that,  few old friends found my blog, and told me to keep it up.  So I wound up writing hundreds of blog posts about weird little moments in the BMX freestyle world, as that sport was just getting off the ground.  

One day, years later, a friend and I were messaging on Facebook, and he said that with all my old school BMX posts, I was kind of like an oldies radio station, but for BMX.  My little stories were like the classic oldies that reminded other old schoolers of their teens and 20's.  I joked back, "Yeah, I'm WPOS radio, We Play Old Shit."  We got a laugh out of it, and I didn't think much of it.  But the WPOS stuck in my head, and became the title for this blog.  So that's the official story of where "WPOS" comes from. 

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