You try to do a friend a favor, and you see where it gets ya…
It all started out with a visit to my good friend Laurie at the radio station today. I thought I’d drop in, say hi, see how she was doing, chat, and maybe go to lunch. Laurie was working the booth, and there were no other DJ’s around. The radio station isn’t large, but it’s fairly popular, playing contemporary rock and pop for the metro area. Laurie’s career had brought her here, and she was more of what we call a big fish in a small pond — enough to have her own show and loyal set of listeners. He radio wit can’t be beat. I got a tour of the station, a high level explanation of the mixing board, saw where the media was kept (which was new since much of it had been moved off of CDs and onto weird funky digital tape-like cartridges with high storage capacity), and Laurie even put me on the air and chat with a few callers.
This all happened in about the span of ten minutes, just before Laurie got the emergency call. I’ve never seen her look so worried. She was highly conflicted, as abandoning her post would surely get her fired, and the issue she needed to take care of couldn’t wait. She made the decision to leave. Yes, that’s right, leave a live radio station unattended. She apologized and took off, too worried to tell me where she was going, or to remember to take her cell phone which sat by the mic. She was gone in an instant.
Soft rock came over the monitors, and it was obvious that the song was about to end. Laurie had just inserted a new DAT tape a few minutes back while we had been chatting. I leaned over the mixer, hit the green start button, the tape started rolling, and apprehensively swapped the fader positions. It had worked!!! Dumb luck, or fantastic observation skills on my part, I managed to seamlessly transition from one song to the other on the air live. I was bursting with pride.
A new idea struck me. If I kept feeding tapes, I ought to be able keep things running semi-smoothly until Laurie got back, saving her job. It was risky, but I figured she’d had little to do. Laurie is one of these friends I feel very close to and would move heaven and earth for, without her having to ask, if it were in my ability.
My pride started to fade as I screwed up the next transition. I let one song completely end and cut into the next abruptly. A forgivable mistake, but I had to make sure that didn’t happen again. The next few songs weren’t as smooth as the first, but certainly not as bad as the next. I kept hoping Laurie would realize she left her phone behind and would either return to get it, or pull over and call. I suspect in the end that she figured I had left right when she did. Perhaps if she were listening to the station, she’d know someone was still manning the booth.
That’s when I noticed the FCC log. She had been casually filling this thing out, and I went into a mad scramble to figure out what had been playing for the last 20 or 25 minutes. I don’t know music, I was just shuffling tapes, and these things weren’t labeled.
In times of stress, time tends to distort, and it felt like hours — songs were ending faster than I could keep up. That’s when two things hit me. One, I hadn’t been playing any commercials, and two, I needed more DAT tapes. I was at the end of the last one.
I scrambled into the side room to the shelf where they were stored. Unfortunately, Laurie had mentioned that she was reorganizing them, and they were unlabeled, or at least to be fair, unlabeled from my perspective. I couldn’t read the writing, and many of them had numbers written on them identifying them in blue Bic pen. I was now on a mad dash for the master look-up sheet.
I never found it. I think she took it with her when she grabbed her purse on the way out. Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, that’s when I realized that about 20 minutes of silence had been coming from the other room. I was so focused on finding that sheet that I totally overlooked we were broadcasting a dead signal.
Certain I had just gotten Laurie fired, I grabbed a tape in the middle of the collection, ran back into the control room, jammed it in, and hit the green button. Christmas music started coming out of the monitors. Tinkly bell, slow Christmas music. I didn’t know if I should stop the song in mid-play and substitute something else, or whether I should let it roll and swap out afterward. I’m certain people were wondering why in the world holiday music was playing in February. Maybe it was some weird “Year of the Rooster” thing for the Chinese New Year. The whole experience was just horrible, and it kept dragging on.
All the while, I kept asking myself, “Where the HELL are the people who run this station and why aren’t they here?”
Turns out the answer was that they have a fairly hefty commute, and the later shows actually sleep on a different schedule, so with the morning backup they couldn’t have gotten there if they wanted to, and in reality, they weren’t aware of the problem in the first place. Laurie was senior enough not to need that kind of supervision. Crap. Crap. Crap.
The guy who -was- supposed to show up called in to call in a favor of Laurie, asking her to take his slot. And so did the chick after that time slot as well. How did I know? The answering machine went off and I heard it from the manager’s office, which had the door open. I couldn’t get to the phone, and never figured out how to open the mic on the desk to let listeners know what was going on.
Seems that the two following hosts were dating, went out to eat, and managed to get food poisoning or the flu or something. The girl didn’t sound well, and left no explanation, while the first caller was a little more graphic (though polite) in his description. Apparently there’s this bug going around which causes you to feel rotten and you’re throwing up all day.
So, recapping, I’m now working a triple shift (that’s 9 hours), for a radio station I don’t listen to, on equipment I don’t understand, playing unlabeled music, for a friend I’m extremely worried about, all so that she can keep her job.
This dragged on for hours and hours in the most painfully detailed way you could possibly imagine. And the guy who was supposed to show up (at least according to the schedule) was late — possibly stuck in traffic.
Some days it just pays to stay in bed.
And there’s the problem: I was in bed. Laurie hasn’t worked in a radio station for years, to the best of my knowledge. It was all fiction.
The whole friggin’ event was one of the most detailed and realistic dreams I’ve had in my life. I’ve been graced with ever so few, and it just turns out that the day before our big demo at work, for which I have to get up for early, I had one.
That’s right. The alarm goes off, and my brain has already worked a stressful 9-hour day. My body was physically exhausted. What should have been a refreshing night’s sleep left me totally drained. I had dark rings under my eyes.
I was now fifteen minutes late for leaving for the office by the time I showered and left the house. By this time the high school kids are on the corner, which means the buses are screwing up traffic. This morning’s commute is going to be longer and uglier than normal.
Leaving the house was a bad omen. I sleepily kiss Tamara goodbye, she asks if I have my scanner, and I show it to her, get in the car, start it, …and I open the car door. I go up, the door is locked, and my keys are in the running car. I ring the doorbell, and Tamara answers it quite concerned.
“I forgot my cell phone,” I explain, as I go inside, take it off the charger, and return to the car. I close the car door, pause it, and get back out.
I ring the doorbell, as the front door is still locked, and Tamara answers, this time too kind to say anything.
“Forgot my bag,” and walked past her to the kitchen table where I snagged the bag of books and media I needed for the demo today. I go back to the car, get in, close the door, pause, too tired to think up a decent explicative, and get back out.
I ring the doorbell. Tamara’s poised at the door.
“Forgot my DVD,” and walked past her to the kitchen table where I picked up the data disc I had burned the night before.
Back to the car. However, this time I see Tamara laughing her ass off through the storm door window. Oh, she might have been feigning politeness, but deep down she was getting an amusing chuckle out of this. By now so much amusement had built up that she was bursting out in laughter.
Mornings and Walt don’t mix well. Or wait, was that Walt doesn’t mix songs well… no wait, that was the dream.
When I got to work we had far more people running through our demo area than expected. I ended up having to edit a proposal with some technical content. And even though the pacing was better than yesterday, the day felt just as long.
When it was over, our boss took us out to a happy hour. Now don’t get me wrong, I sincerely appreciate the gesture of appreciation. However, I don’t drink, and I don’t enjoy secondhand smoke, and there was certainly enough of both. I was getting a headache, partly due to the chemically enriched tobacco, and partly because I had had little to eat.
Jumping ahead, Alan came over afterward to go out to a steak dinner. Long Horn was selected, primarily because of great food, great prices, and great service.
Obviously, because I’m still writing, you can expect that at least one of those three criteria weren’t met.
Our waitress, who was new to us, indicated that she recognized us as regulars. This was a good start and was about to bump her up to the 20% tip bracket.
She took Alan’s order, then Tamara’s, and Tamara asked about splitting the check, and then the waitress split. She never took my order.
Curious to see how this was going to play out, I waited for her to return. I’d waited at the fictitious radio station, I waited all day during the demo, and now I was waiting to see if I was going to get to eat.
She came back, put a salad in front of Tamara and myself, and Tamara mentioned that I’d really like to order now. Some how she equated splitting the check as sharing a meal.
I gave my regular order, and to keep things simple, asked for Thousand Island dressing. She took two steps away from the table, literally, and asked me again, double-checking the Thousand Island dressing.
A lot of time passes, some proxy drops off the salads, and you know enough by now to guess that my salad had nothing on it that resembled Thousand Island dressing.
So, I didn’t touch it, and waited even more for her to come back and refill drinks (which never happened the whole night), and to ask how our food was. By this time my steak arrived.
The manager came over to see how we were doing, and I filled him in on what was going on. Nothing major, but this wasn’t the consistent service we normally get. He offered to fix my salad, and I accepted.
The new salad arrived, and I asked for A1 sauce for the steak. And after a long while, I heard A1 being delivered to the table across the partition from us. They, confused, apparently didn’t order A1.
It showed up at our table along with an explanation that our shrimp would be out in a little bit.
You should instantly be asking yourself if we ordered shrimp, because that’s exactly what we did. We informed the proxy waiter that we didn’t order that. He went off in a mad scramble to cancel the order with the kitchen.
From there on out, the meal went fine. It wasn’t until we asked for our check that the insanity resumed. Prior to that time, we had little to no contact with our server, the would-be recipient of our tip.
It seems that there was a problem getting the shrimp removed from our check. And this process took about 20 minutes to coax the computer to do it. The manager solved the problem by subtracting the amount of some other food item we also didn’t order. As a result, the tab had one ‘Lucky Lunch’ removed from the total.
Now, both Alan and Tamara had credit cards in their hand when they were given the bill. But this didn’t stop the waitress from running off again.
Tamara had enough time to finish her drink, hit the restroom, and return for me to tell her a story.
The story was that when we went out to Red, Hot, and Blue the night before, I went to the restroom. As I was in the stall, a dad came in with a little girl and they entered the adjacent stall. She was complaining that she had to go pee, but didn’t want to do it in the boys’ bathroom. Her dad assured her that no one was watching, and when that failed he went into a nice explanation about gender differences and why dad couldn’t go in mommy’s restroom. Turns out the complaint from the little girl had nothing to do with either, it turns out our amenities weren’t as nice as the girls’ bathroom. Our toilet paper didn’t have flowers on it. HA! And you thought I was joking in my last posts; here’s a child exposing the elaborate pampering the female gender gets. Equality my foot.
Eventually the waitress returns, collects the credit cards, and we spend another wait getting them back.
All in all, I’m ready for this day to be over. I look at the clock, and it’s not even 7:30pm yet. The night’s still young, and Hell has a treasure trove of experiences waiting for me. What next? Already TiVo recorded a show that the super bowl stomped on and I had to manually reschedule. I’m afraid to touch anything.
I just want to crawl in bed in the fetal position and wait for midnight to pass.
So in reflection, Laurie dear, in many ways this crappy day is your fault for abandoning me in a world that never really existed. If I didn’t care so much about you to save your fictitious career as a high profile DJ, I might have actually gotten some rest and been able to cope. Should you fall asleep tonight, please swing by and pick up your cell phone …which should have been a major clue to me, as you don’t have one of those either.
Argh!