Whatever trepidation I felt wasn't the problem. Rather, the problem concerned what I'd call myself when I went on the air and - more seriously - what I'd call my program.
The first part was easy, really; I decided to be myself. I figured that the physical anonymity afforded by radio was such that I needn't feel particularly exposed by being exactly who I was in real life, and that being myself seemed to me to grant me some authenticity as a programmer (not everyone holds this view, nor do they need to. It was a personal decision).
But the title for my would-be program was something else entirely. I was stuck. Everything sounded either hokey or taxonomic. So, I turned to the Oblique Strategies for advice. I got out my trusty deck, shuffled the cards, and cut the deck to draw one:
| remember .those quiet evenings |
In that phrase, I realized was the goal I'd actually set for myself - that of remembering or recovering those times when listening was a pleasure, and to do so in the face of the oncoming working week (which is always something that one faces when programming on Sunday evening). Since the phrase was a teensy bit long, I simply made it an acronym.
And that is how RTQE came to be.