🍀 My Game Show Bucket List Dream Manifested on St. Patrick’s Day 2014! 🍀

🍀 On this day, St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2014, I started a new Electrical Engineering job in the Flatiron District of Manhattan, NYC. I was so excited! As you know,St. Patrick’s Day is a very important and lauded holiday in New York City. So, I was already very excited to be starting a new job on a very cool holiday. However, I was even more preoccupied because I had learned a couple of days prior that at the SAME time, on the SAME day as starting my new job, the episode I played on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire was released on national television! I had learned that it would be on tv at lunchtime. 

So, on my FIRST day of work, at a VERY serious job near Madison Square Park, I’m running in asking my co-workers where I could watch tv!!! As you can imagine, they had all of the emotions for the “new guy”. They were confused, excited, weirded out, annoyed, intrigued… all by this new girl wanting to find a television on the first day instead of a work computer. Thankfully, new co-workers generally tend to be very well meaning on the first day. So, they told me I could find a television at a bar down the street - closeby to our highrise office building. I believe it was Fitzgerald’s Pub, on Third Avenue. I walked in with my new co-workers (who in time were comfortable showing their open disdain for me). I was ok with that. This was a dream come true! To be on a game show on national television. 

When the opening “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” music came on, I saw Cedric the Entertainer (who was the host at the time) and then MY FACE - on the television -  it was a literal out-of-body experience.

Because, you see, at the time - I was a boring engineer. Sure, I had travelled and had all kinds of adventures. Sure, I’d built engineering projects all around the country and had had a big, big life. But, the biggest things my co-workers bragged about was going skiing for the weekend or going out drinking or client projects. But this was me… at 40 years young. Seeing myself on television. It was not anything I’d every even imagine in my wildest dreams. I remember back to the taping day so vividly. The green room, the preparation - how they’d trained us to READ THE QUESTION - bc the producer told me that in the question, you could always find the answer.

Easier said than done with a bajillion eyeballs on you! 

I guess that was the beginning of the end of an amazing chapter of my work life because only a few short years later, I quit that job and embarked on running my own business - which today - really does focus on entertainment and creative endeavors!

Learn the blow by blow plays on the episode here at my Wiki Fandom Page!