I work with a television station where my job is to control a large console that has a hundred switches, buttons and dials, much like the inside of a cockpit. I have an eye on the TV screen showing a live discussion happening next door, another on the monitor that shows icons of advertising films cued in to be aired during the break, and a third on the producer who is watching the host through a glass window. My right hand flies all over – adjusting volume and light, switching cameras, plugging and unplugging phone calls – while the left hand is firmly planted on the switch that replaces live feed with the adverts.

It’s a very important job, crucial even, and requires multitasking with the right hand and absolute stillness and quick reflex of the left.

I can be talking into my microphone, listening into my earpiece, resetting the playlist, and switching between three incoming feeds at the same time, on any given day. My specialty is speed. I have a sharp mind, an alert eye and 10 very nimble fingers. I can change the view of viewers without them noticing any change. I can push up and reduce the output volume without listeners noticing any change. I can throw switches and type commands on my keyboard at a speed that electricity finds hard to keep up with.

I make sure I not just meet but surpass the expectations of my superiors. If they ask me to squeeze 35 seconds of adverts into an available slot of 25 seconds, I’ll make them room for 40. It’s a matter of professionalism for me. What goes on the screen is none of my business; when and how, is. But not that I’ll take orders from just about anyone; I am very clear about who my superiors are.

It’s definitely not the producer who has the overall production responsibility and who sits in the studio pretending to be in-charge. The producer is merely a post office between the programme host across the glass window, the marketing director who is also the owner’s nephew, and I. The director gives me a list of adverts; I calculate and tell the producer they have 35 minutes in the hour-long programme. He spends the rest of the time struggling to reconcile this knowledge with the frivolous demands hosts often make, like: ‘give me two minutes to wrap up this discussion’. What kind of professional anchorperson requires all of 120 seconds to wrap up a discussion about nothing? I take them as morons and they take producers as dimwitted, evil creatures. The hosts do not, however, rub me in the wrong way. They are vaguely impressed with my prowess and skill and slightly jealous of my firm grip on the transmission switch. They know I can take them off-air before they can say: ‘please don’t’.

I have science on my side. I can show technical data to prove that the disruption in a programme after its host called me an ‘advertovorous pig’ during the break (I’d removed my headsets and the idiot thought I wasn’t listening when I could hear him loud and clear on hi-fi speakers) was due to a routine maintenance of satellite transmitters and none of my fault. They know I wield real power and they respect me for it.

Because of my mastery I am always picked to do the most challenging and well-paying job in the business – operating broadcast studio during the live, limited-over cricket matches of Pakistan. For the channel to acquire the rights to broadcast live cricket is not a decision made for the love of cricket; it is all about money. Cricket, like education and health services, is a fast selling commodity. Airing live matches is a way of making quick money through advertising and requires a total and complete detachment from the subject and a sharp and consistent focus on timing, in order to squeeze every second for whatever its revenue potential is. It’s a specialised job for which they come to the best in the profession – me.

It’s this job that pays me in a few weeks what I normally earn in a year that makes me disown it. I don’t tell my children what exactly I do; neither do I ever bring them in to the control room. I talk to them about transmission frequencies, microwaves, satellites … and let them imagine that my work is not much different from what they do at NASA. It is because off-work I love cricket and I love watching it with my daughter.

Say we are watching the second and last T20 (which is actually the only one in the series as the first was washed out) between Pakistan and South Africa. In the middle of South African innings, Miller plays a shot off Hafeez that looks like a sure boundary when something special happens: a fielder leaps into view in the right corner of the screen and plucks the ball neatly. It is a spectacular catch, something we’d like to watch from three different angles. But we don’t even get to watch a replay to see who took the catch. As the fielder lands on ground with the ball clutched tightly in his hands, the television switches to advertisements without even waiting for the umpire’s signal.

It makes us both wince and whine that at a dramatic moment in the game we are not watching on-field action but young people getting all romantic over a particular brand of biscuits and criminal gangs fighting over whose mobile phone screen is bigger. ‘These TV people must hate cricket, and I hate them for that’ my daughter announces decidedly, and I go red in the ears. It’s someone like me who has just made room for an additional half a minute of advertising to go on air in place of the replay of Miller getting caught brilliantly by Ahmed Shahzad (as I learn from Cricinfo running on my laptop).

He is a professional like me and at this moment his mind is certainly not on cricket. He did not see the rare athleticism on show by a Pakistani fielder; all he saw was an opportunity to make some more money for the channel. I would have done the same.

I’m thinking of quitting this job; for the love of my daughter if not for cricket.