Assrattery and a day I would like to forget

I will do the obligitories before getting into the day that I would rather forget. The change meter barely moved this week, I only found four cents through the course of the week, as a result the tote board now reads a grand total of $12.13. Certainly nothing to write home about, but then again, I can't even remember the last time I wrote a letter at all, I am much more of an email person in that regard.

Another week of hockey has come to a conclusion, and when I last mentioned it I stated that was playing the 4th place team, so I was unsure of how well I would do. My concerns were pretty much unfounded, as I went 8-1-1 again last week and have officially clinched a playoff spot in the process. Not to brag too much on myself, but over the course of the last 4 weeks, my team has went 33-5-2 and the overall record now stands at 119-67-24. I did pick up 3 pts on the first place team, I now trail by 13 pts in the standings with 2 weeks to go but the better news is I increased my lead over third place to 31 pts. I would need an epic collapse over the last two weeks now to miss getting a first round bye in the playoffs.

The TV thing went okay I guess, I got a couple of compliments and one person called this morning to say I looked nice, but I would be lying if I said I was the star of the show. More to the point, most of the time I felt like the dumbest person in the room and on those moments where I thought I made a decent point (rare as they were) I have no doubt that they would conflict with the general view of the radio audience so my reasoning isn't going to win a lot of points with that crowd. Oh well, they asked for me, not someone who is going to spew talking points for either side of the political spectrum, if they wanted that, I am sure there are plenty of people who would go do that instead, just not my cup of tea.

As for today, let's just say, it wasn't all that much fun. I took Friday off as a vacation day, seeing as how I get three weeks of vacation time, and I almost always lose better than two weeks of it by the end of the year through my own unwillingness to take time off. I don't take time off for two reasons, 1) I like my job for the most part save for today when I would have given it away and 2) I find my job harder to do when I come back because things get done wrong in my absence. Well, today was no different. I set myself up on Sunday before I left so that I could come in and start editing podcasts in the morning, I am a couple days behind on that, but I had all of them ready to be edited when I first got there. Usually I can edit a three hour show in about 30-40 minutes if I keep my mental mistakes to a minimum. I am doing the posting of the first show when the phone rings and it is Lynn saying she can't make it in today, she isn't feeling well. That leaves me a couple of options, one being I host the show myself, but then I have to have Nick come in to produce and I know he was working the FM station later that evening, so that idea gets shot down rather quickly. Second, I could try to gather a guest host by clearing it with the Program Director and then making phone calls to see who is available. That plan came up rather empty as well, leaving me no choice but to come up with a "Best of" show on the fly. This meant all that time I was to be editing podcasts just got frittered away because now I have to edit audio so that I can run it as today's show. By now, we are nearing 7am, and a change in programming, we go from simulcasting the local morning news on Ch 4, which is a disaster in itself, to running the Laura Ingraham show on tape delay. You may think I am hard on the news, so allow me to explain the intellect that passes for news anchors round these parts. Kelly Frye, local idiot blonde is sitting behind the desk telling us about last nite's Oscar winners, Helen Mirren winning for her portrayal as Queen Elizabeth, then she says the following, "And keeping with the theme of royalty, Forrest Whitaker won Best Actor for "The Last King of Scotland". Royalty, Forrest Whitaker is portraying Idi fucking Amin. Maybe I missed the memo that royalty was all about snacking on people, I don't know, but this passes for our news coverage in the morning. I swear we should just shut the station off, it would sound better.

Anyway, we are back at the programming change, we get through our local newscast okay and then I am to run Laura Ingraham. We recently upgraded our software at the station, we are running Maestro which is a Windows based system that takes the place of all of those carts that used to lay around studios. This system is an upgrade over what we used to use, the Digital Cartridge System which did much of the same thing, but was an older DOS based program. When we get Maestro fully functional I imagine it will be quite the system, but it isn't fully functional yet. The idea is that it will do all of the taping we need to do in the background such as Laura Ingraham that we run on delay, and add it to the system after it records it. The problem being not all of the bugs are worked out yet, so it doesn't record the hour of Laura I need properly, it puts all of the information under one cart heading as opposed to the 5 we are looking to have it use (one for each show segment). As a result, I have taken to taping that hour of the show on reel, and then just running it off of reel rather than relying on the computer. The problem being, since I wasn't there Friday to tape it, I went to cue up the reel, and after about 30 seconds the audio on the reel stops. Yes, the recording was fucked up, so now I am forced to go to the one cart that all of the audio is recorded under and play it instead, aware that I am now about a minute behind where I need to be, and unlike a reel where I can just fast forward to make up the time, there is nothing I can do with the cart except play from the beginning. Now I get to start trying to create a radio show from scratch.

As I start this project, I realize it is getting close to the time to power up the radio station (AM stations have to change their signal at night, it is a long convoluted FCC thing that I would rather not explain here, suffice it to say, we don't run full power until we are legally allowed to do so, in Feb that is 7:15am). I go to switch transmitters (we have two different ones, one for our day signal and one for our night signal) and sure enough, the day site isn't working. We can run a similar signal pattern off of our nite site, but it comes with the ensuing phone calls from everyone asking why they can't hear the station and you end up spending more time on the phone talking to people about the problem than just fixing it or at least placing the calls into people (i.e. our engineer) who can fix it.

As we get to the bottom of the first hour we get ready to play a two minute newscast, it turns out the newscast was sent late and as a result didn't get to us in time for the computer to update the cart, so the newscast that starts playing is from Friday, not Monday morning. The day, by 7:30am is an absolute train wreck. And I still have three hours of audio to edit.

The only plus I will say to all of this is that by the time I was done, I had managed to fool enough listeners into thinking we were doing live radio as opposed to tape, so I can take that as a little consolation, but by 12:30, I wanted nothing more than to just go home and go to bed, sleep this entire disaster off with a quality afternoon nap. That too would come with complications, as I was getting into town, I found out that a number of the busses were being detoured, apparently a work crew in their infinite wisdom decided puncturing a natural gas line in downtown Pittsburgh would make for great comedy so they went ahead and did it, and created traffic delays out the ass for their efforts.

Speaking of ass, we close with this week's Asshat winner. I clued Lee into my thinking as to where I wanted to go with this about midweek last week. I was leaning to Kentucky Fried Chicken for something they did that I found idiotic. Apparently, KFC has decided that they wish to profit off of the Lenten crowd by offering a Fish Snacker sandwich. That wasn't enough though, the CEO sent a letter to the Vatican asking for a papal blessing for said fish sandwich. As I told Lee, unless the man in the funny hat is working the fryer, I really don't care what he thinks of the sandwich, and if by chance the Pope is moonlighting at KFC then I only hope that he isn't spitting in my food. End of story, right? Wrong!!! The CEO of KFC got wind of the potential of being an Asshat (a blessing in it's own right to be sure) and suggested that they could do even more to truly earn the honor. As a result I give you this, as the song says, "There's a rat in the kitchen, what am I gonna do?" Well this KFC/Taco Bell in NYC has at least gotten the first half of the verse down, not so sure about the second half though. Happy eating and Happy Assrattery as well.