Nothing good ever comes from a Friday
night phone call.
Whenever my phone rings on a Friday
night and I see it's someone from work, I tense up a little on the
inside. It means that something has gone wrong. It means that the
sporting event we're carrying on our ESPN station isn't going well,
or it means that our antenna has blown up and we'll be at 1 percent
power for the next five months. So when my phone rang at 9:24 pm
last Friday, I knew it probably wasn't good news.
And it wasn't.
The hard drive on the computer that
puts everything on the air died, which means that we had nothing on
the air. Thankfully, we have a bit of a backup system in another one
of our studios, so after an hour or so of frantic work I was able to
get music back on the air, and after most of a weekend of work
(aside, of course, from joining Loraine at one of the greatest events
to which one can ever attend, yesterday's SAIL Chocolate Festival)
you couldn't tell by listening we had a dead hard drive.
At least I hope you couldn't tell.
Because it was part of an old computer
system, we had to get someone who knew what they were talking about
to get it back up to speed; thankfully, whatever they did seems to be
working for now (knock on wood). Until they fixed our machine, we
spent the weekend playing music and the like out of a production
studio. Since we were trying to keep the radio experience as normal
as possible, we were also taking phone calls and doing everything we
normally do. But because our production studio isn't set up to do
that, we had to do something like this when doing a contest--
Announce we're doing the contest in the
production studio.
Run down the hall to the air studio,
take the phone call, and record it.
Run back to the production studio, call
up the phone call sound file from our network, and play it
Fun, huh? And when I spoke with
someone from Weatherology about the weather I had to do the exact
same thing, except for the fact that I had a 30 second window in
which I had to start a commercial, run down the hall, call them, and
start talking. Then while they were wrapping up the forecast at the
end, I had to run back down the hall to the other studio and start
the next element when they were finished.
Good thing I'm in shape, huh?
Thankfully, this was just a temporary
thing. But over the weekend if you heard something weird, it wasn't
the fault of your radio.
It was because of a Friday night phone
call.
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