Sunday, Sunday

Greetings from work.  I know, I haven't been in the habit of blogging from here while I am on duty, but I felt a change of pace was in order.  I haven't been here all that long, probably less than 30 minutes and already I have printed up a commercial fed sheet for the Alan Colmes Show that I needed, ran off a copy of Scott's log for his show coming up in 45 minutes, set up the system to record the first part of Scott's show, as he has an advertiser that wants a copy of a live read he does emailed to them, started burning next week's Lutheran Hour into the system, got Talkshoe running for Jane's show, which I am currently producing and made a run at fixing the coffee machine, all in 30 minutes or less, or your next pizza is free.  See, I really do work on Sundays.

Actually, part of the reason I started this entry is that it is going to be a long day, or day and night and day as the case may be.  Carol is off again this week, so I am fending for myself, which on Sunday means it is far better for me to just stay here overnight than try to go home and come back in again.  I left myself enough production work that that really shouldn't be a problem.  Actually, they changed the hours of Ron's show in the afternnon during the week, it now starts at 2pm as opposed to 3pm, which just means I have an hour less time in the production room than I would normally have.  So I got what was needed to get done last week and saved the rest for today.  Since it is Sunday and the 16th at that, I can pile all of the hours up at the beginning of the week and bill the station for more overtime, as our pay period ends on the 15th, this will be a full week on the next pay period.

Allow me to explain the method of pay that we have here, if I havenm't already.  Our pay periods end on the 15th and the end of every month.  That being said, now that I am again allowed to fill out time sheets, when doing a sheet, we do them not by hours worked per pay period, but by hours worked per week, so if I work 50 hours in a week, I get overtime, but if the pay period ends in the middle of a week, then I only get credit for the half week that week, which means on some pay periods, you will start in the middle of a week, then log a full week, then log another half week.  You don't get to add the two half weeks together, even if they would amount to more than 40 hours, you only get overtime if you work 40 hours in a specific week, so it is entirely plausible to have a pay period where you could work for 100+ hours and not qualify for overtime.  From a business perspective, I assume it is a clever way of getting around paying OT, from an employee perspective, it sucks ass.

Soi far I have screened 3 calls in the first half of Jane's show here.  Jane does a show called Garden Talk, and I can't imagine how long she and Scott who is coming up in less than 30 minutes have been on radio in Pittsburgh.  We picked them both up when we went from a sports station to a talk station and have had them on weekends, either Saturday or Sunday ever since.   Mind you they were on a station that used to be a talk station before us, but when we flipped to talk was the same time that they flipped to sports, so many of their hosts were left without a home, including Lynn and Doug at the time as well as Jane and Scott.  Okay, enough background stuff, the odd thing is, since they moved Jane's show to Sundays after the most recent format flip, from talk to business talk, calls have been few and far between.  As I look out my window, I see the snow falling (thankfully it isn't laying yet) and yet now we are getting calls on gardening of all things.

Scott's show has fared better, at least caller wise since the flip.  Heck, he set a record for calls he took in his show just a couple of weeks ago.  Mind you, it isn't national talk show type numbers, but getting 33 people to call in in a  two hour show on Birds and Nature is pretty impressive in my book.

Check that, calls 4 and 5 for Jane are on hold now.  Lots of pruning questions and caring for plants in winter.  You would think when it is 30 some degrees outside gardening wouldn't be an issue, but it seems to be today is just the opposite.

I would say that the interest in these shows is due to my extraordinary producing ability, but that most likely isn't the case.  Apparently I am better at this thing that I thought though, as the host of the financial show I am producing twice a week now (Tuesday and Thursday 8am-9am) recently had lunch with our program director and general manager and praised my work that I have done for them.  Mind you, at some of the other stations they have bought time for their show, they had people who couldn't even work a board or worse, they actually had a show where nobody even showed up to run the thing, so I don't know if it is my skill set that has impressed them so much, or if the bar has been set so low that literally anyone could step over it.

I just realized that I am being really long winded today.  Sorry, caller #6 is on hold.  What the hell?  Did I wake up in bizarro world where I am expected to do my job or something?  Usually I can spend at least Jane's show getting a couple of side projects done, so far the only things I have gotten done since the show has started is this much of the blog and I managed to label and send the Lutheran Hour track that I ripped off of CD into the automation system, so it is ready to go for next Sunday. 

Sorry, I ducked away for a second.  Nothing major, but I wanted to see if any more bits from a feature we carry, Bloomberg Boot Camp had been posted online so I could record them today.  BBC is a two minute feature that runs once a day during the week and basically it is tech gadget type news, one minute techies stuff, one minute commercial.  Because they don't have to be timely, usually they post them about a week in advance, but when I had left on Friday, only Monday through Wednesday had been posted for this week, so I wanted to check and see if Thursday and Friday had been posted after I left.  No such luck.I would have liked to have that done today as one of my projects for my overly long shift, but I guess that will have to wait.

Wow, Jane's show is done that means I have three minutes to change everything around.  I have to log out of Talkshoe then relog in, which involves both a phone line and the  Talkshoe website, start rolling tape on Scott's show so I can capture the live read audio that his advertiser wants,  set up the break to run after the news and realize that I just made at least half a dozen typos while telling you that.  Wonder Twin Powers activate, shape of a chimp, form of a typewriter, and lo and behold it's Shakespeare.  Kudos to the two poeple in the room that got that convoluted reference, unless Zan and Jana are reading, then the total would be up to 4.

Call #1 for Scott is on hold,  Actually, his show will be a little different today, he has two taped interviews in the second hour, so I will not be screening any calls then, instead I will be doing other stuff, including taking a cigarette break 30 minutes ahead of schedule.

Coffee update, I don't know what is wrong with the machine, but I managed to get coffee out of it, not great coffee mind you, but coffee nonetheless.  The sugar embargo continues at work, right now we have some, but it will run out in the next day or so, then we will once again be at the mercy of management whether or not we will be blessed with the glorified sweetener, or be forced to suffer without.  I continue my silent protest of using two coffee stirrers as opposed to one for each cup until the embargo is lifted.  Power to the people and all that jazz.

I did mention that Lynn and I had lunch the other day, we got to do some catching up.  I didn't post where we are going simply because if someone were to read this and take it upon themselves to show up unannounced, I would have felt like a complete idiot.  There are some precautions I take when it comes to the internet and privacy, that was one of them.  Sure I will post my address, because I don't care about things regarding me all that much, if I did, I wouldn't have Ask Matt Anything blogs, but when the issue involves the privacy of others, clamming up is the rule du jour.  That being said, I could have told you all, because we ended up going someplace else, to the William Penn Tavern and it was my first visit to the place. 

Sorry about that, calls 2,3 and 4 are now on hold.  I better take a break from this for a while, I think I might have to do my job here.  Imagine that, I am at work and I actually think I should be working, will wonders never cease?

Back again, not that I am not still woprking on Scott's show, but we are into the taped interview portion of the program.  Apparently Scott's daughter attends Cornell University, where she plays basketball and they are in Pittsburgh today to play the Duquense women's team, so he wanted to duck out to see his daughter play.  That's cool with me, it gives me more of a chance to work on this.

As I was saying, Lynn changed plans and opted for the William Penn Tavern.  I had picked the last time, so she picked this time.  Originally we had planned on China Palace, the same place Phil and I went to just a couple of weeks ago, but Lynn, like many women I know, changed her mind.  Cool with me, I can eat bar food as well as anyone.  Actually, I ended up with a really good andouille sauasage sandwich with grilled green peppers and onions.  Most delish.  And the conversation was pretty good too, I got a better handle on the offers she is entertaining.  Neither of which offer a producer, though one does offer a board op to help out.

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Sorry about that, but work got in the way of blogging again.  Even now, at almost 10:30pm, almost 11hours after I started I am still technically working.  Right now I am putting a second Lutheran Hour into the system.  Because our ripping system only allows us to put in one cut per cart number, I can't rip this into the system, I have to put it in in real time, which will eat up about 30 minutes and allow me to work on this a little more.  I actually got quite a bit done, 1 Lou Dobbs report, 5 Clark Howard Minutes, 15 Bloomberg Market Minutes, 2 Lutheran Hours, 12 Matrix spots, 5 Daily Aardvarks, 5 MJI MF 5s (which we conveniently call MJI Mother Fuckers), 75 Alan Colmes spots, and 16 Clark Howard Spots, one audio dub for a client (Songbird Sanctuary) and updated one of my cue sheets I use for recording spots.  Not too shabby if I do say so myself. 

Before work so rudely interrupted me I was talking about lunch with Lynn.  Anyway, she asked that if she does land a show if I would like to be her producer.  It is certainly something to mull over, I know I would like to do it, but at the same time, I don't know if I can work this job around whatever I would do for her.  Don't get me wrong, I would like nothing more than  to be back in the saddle again, so to speak, but at the same time if I did work for her, the expense would be coming out of her pocket, and I know I couldn't live on just working for her, nor would I expect working for her to pay what I am making at my full time gig (as paltry a sum as that is), so it would be a matter of juggling the two and whether I could do both.  Then again, all may fall through and she may not be back on the radio at all, so I don't want to get too far ahead of myself just yet.  I guess I will deal with that potential problem when the time comes.

I am glad I didn't listen to any sports talk after the Steelers game today.  I can imagine it was full of pissed off people.  Not that the Steelers lost, in fact they won, 11-10 by kicking a field goal with 15 seconds remaining in the game.  But what happened after that is what will have people bitching this week.  On the first play after the ensuing kickoff, San Diego tried the old "lateral the ball all over the place" gimmick that works once in a blue moon, but was all they had left to try as the clock was running, so they probably wouldn't have had time for another  play, and they had no timeouts left.  Anyway, one lateral went off without a hitch and just as the ball carrier was about to be tackled, he tried lateralling to another teammate but Troy Palomalu jumped in betwen the two players and scooped up the ball and ran for what was an apparent touchdown with no time remaining.  Ther referees ruled that one of the laterals was an illegal forward pass, though replay shows that it clearly wasn't.  Now you may ask, what does it matter, Pittsburgh would have won the game anyway, whether they got credit for the touchdown and potential extra point for an 18-10 win, or an 11-10 win.  Truth be told, to the Steelers it doesn't matter all that much, points scored are somewhere around 7th in the list of tiebreakers, should a tiebreaker be needed to decide anything come playoff time.  Where it does matter however is for those people that gambled on the game, as Pittsburgh was a 4.5 point favorite at kickoff, so the touchdown or lack thereof did affect the outcome of quite a few wagers out there, and truth be told it also affected quite a few fantasy football leagues as well, including mine where those 6 points would have come in handy as they would have cut into my opponents score (his defense (San Diego) would be credited with giving up 18 points as opposed to 11, meaning the call cost me probably 3 fantasy points with our scoring system), and those people that play in IDP leagues (Individual Defensive Player, as opposed to team defense) and had Troy as one of their defensive players would have lost a bunch of points as defensive player TDs are very hard to come byand are usually rewarded quite handsomely.

Damn, I am a prattling machine, and on the most boring of topics to boot.  Well, any questions about what I just typed can be saved for the next Ask Matt Anything, date and time to be determined, the only thing definite is the place.

My second Lutheran Hour is complete, and I think that is all of the work I am going to do this evening.  If I am going to be working overnight all week, no sense piling everything into one day.  I have plenty of other things I can do, like make something to eat, though I just had a TV dinner (management hasn't rationed the electricity to the microwave, yet), so I am not all that hungry.  I did bring some DVDs from home and I have another book that I started reading the other day ("The Urban Hermit") that was going to be tossed out here at work before I snagged it and starting reading it, simply because it is cheaper than buying books, and it turns out that it isn't all that bad.  The number of books passing through my hands here has shrunken greatly, I can't be requesting review copies of books when we have no one to interview the authors.  I have to rely on blind luck that publishers just send us books in hopes of getting their author interviewed and not knowing that I can do nothing to help them.  Either that or I have to go get a library card, because I can't be dropping cash on myself during the holiday season, I have to be more frugal than that.  My mom just called my house today while I was at work to talk about Christmas.  Oh the humanity, I haven't even contemplated starting my shopping yet, let alone making holiday plans. 

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I may have to rename this blog entry Monday, Monday, since technically we have passed midnight.  I spent some time working on my Pogo badges, though Freecell may not get done this week.  I also took a quick peek at my fantasy hockey team, and while the nuimbers aren't finalized yet, I am going to be happy if I win 3 games, as I did very little today to help myself.  I have a better chance in fantasy football, compliments of decent games from Peyton Manning, Steve Slaton and the Philadelphia defense.  Still, a win isn't a win until the computer tells me so, and I know my opponent still has a couple of guys playing Monday night. 

The flurries are still flying outside, they have been pretty much all day now.  Nothing on the ground, so they are just more of an annoyance than anything else, a reminder that colder weather is yet to come, and I can do without colder weather, thank you very much. 

One good thing about being at work this late is I am reminded of why I don't need cable TV.  I am flipping through the channels here and VH1 has "The Pickup Artist" on, and the guy hosting the show is some no name dirtbag dressed up like an assclown.  We are definitely losing the war on stupidity here.  Thankfully I can go take a nap and read my book, which seems like a good plan right about now, since I have to be back up in a few hours.