Have you ever locked yourself out of the station

[wattagecottage]

I remember locking myself out of the station one night while stepping out for a smoke, lucky I had a spare key in my car (car had touchpad). No worse feeling in all the world.

 

[weee]

> I remember locking myself out of the station one night while
> stepping out for a smoke, lucky I had a spare key in my car
> (car had touchpad). No worse feeling in all the world.
>
Greg Dickerson, is that you? LOL did ya hear one weekend Dickerson left the studio during a break and left his keys inside! When he got back on air, he admitted what happened.

 

[riradioguy]

> I remember locking myself out of the station one night while
> stepping out for a smoke, lucky I had a spare key in my car
> (car had touchpad). No worse feeling in all the world.

What a fun question! While on air, on WRIU 90.3, in my less sober days... I locked myself out of the building (probably smoking). Luckily... I had just started the Jawbreaker song Bivouac (10min) and was able to find someone to let me back in before the song ended.

 

[ChuckIgo]

> I remember locking myself out of the station one night while
> stepping out for a smoke, lucky I had a spare key in my car
> (car had touchpad). No worse feeling in all the world.
>

locked out of the Stuart Street Studios of WBCS/WMJX one Sunday Afternoon. "Little Disc Jockey's" room was out of the studio area (locks & stuff) off the 2nd floor corridor.
the push-button combination lock unit had broken away from the wooden door, so no matter how hard i pushed on the buttons, the unit just kept sliding through the door. the glass front doors were also locked, requiring a mag-strip card to access.
i flew downstairs where the security guard, nice as he was, spoke very little english. several longer minutes later, he finally came up the stairs and used his passkey to get me in the glass doors.

the upside to this story is that Paul Shulins had a silence-sense activated backup tape at the xmitter site which not only played (first song: Outbound Plane by Suzy Boggus) but also activated the engineering pagers. by the time i had gotten back to the air studio, Suzy was singing & the hot line was ringing - it was one of the engineers (Louis Muise) calling to check on things. backup tape stopped once i hit the next jingle. pretty slick system.

 

[Eli Polonsky]

The entire electric swipe card door lock system in the building that WBUR is in died one night a few months ago. I arrived there to start my shift at midnight and could not get in. The previous host came downstairs just after the midnight ID break and met me outside, and could not get back in. The BBC World Service was running as usual, but it was unattended for about twenty-five minutes.

We called B.U. security and they got a locksmith there with a master key. I got in just barely in time to do the first live BBC break at 12:29 AM. There was no sign on air that anything had been wrong.

WMBR at MIT had incredible amounts of trouble with the swipe card reader lock they got from MIT a few years ago. The company that made it promptly went out of business, so neither a direct replacement lock or replacement parts were available. After many months of repeatedly attempting to order a new swipe card lock from MIT, they came down and installed a numerical keypad coded lock instead, which they didn't want. Passcodes always end up getting to people who shouldn't get them somehow. They finally just installed a new brand of swipe card lock, which seems to be working.

I think electronic locks are yet another one of the many ways that companies are ripping people off for frequent repairs and replacements in the New Millennium. How often did quality conventional old-fashioned analog key locks malfunction compared to this new electronic junk? Then, you have swipe cards that keep wearing out every year... good quality old-fashioned keys lasted for decades, heavy-duty ones could last lifetimes.

 

[Eli Polonsky]

> locked out of the Stuart Street Studios of WBCS/WMJX one
> Sunday Afternoon. "Little Disc Jockey's" room was out of
> the studio area (locks & stuff) off the 2nd floor corridor.
> the push-button combination lock unit had broken away from
> the wooden door, so no matter how hard i pushed on the
> buttons, the unit just kept sliding through the door.

That happened to me with the same wooden door when I worked there at oldies 1150 AM WMEX in the mid-80's. I discovered that, with a little elbow grease applied, those wooden doors were not too difficult to simply yank open even when locked. You just had to yank both doors apart at the same time, and the lock between the two doors would separate.

If any other PD's or GM's are reading, don't worry, I'm not going to tear your station apart. Forearm tendonitis has prevented me from working out for the past few months anyway, so I'm not that strong anymore.

 

[MCarney]

> I remember locking myself out of the station one night while
> stepping out for a smoke, lucky I had a spare key in my car
> (car had touchpad). No worse feeling in all the world.
>
I haven't, but I bailed someone out. When I was at The River, Keith Andrews was on mornings. He went out for a smoke around 7a, and the keypad didn't work when he tried to get back in. I lived 5 minutes away and had a spare key, so he called me from the police station across the street. Thankfully the Bruce Springsteen CD kept playing!

 

[ChuckIgo]

>
> That happened to me with the same wooden door when I worked
> there at oldies 1150 AM WMEX in the mid-80's. I discovered
> that, with a little elbow grease applied, those wooden doors
> were not too difficult to simply yank open even when locked.
> You just had to yank both doors apart at the same time, and
> the lock between the two doors would separate.
>

in this case, the cypher-lock door (singular - circa 1995) was very much incapable of being pulled from the door frame (singular). i think i recall the setup from when you were there (mid 80's) as i interviewed for one of the original (mid80's) wimex gigs.

i was able to get the door open enough to attempt to get the attention of Joe McMillan (who was on Magic at the time), but he was very much in that air studio with the doors closed, the cans on, and the volume on high. he couldn't hear a thing.

 

[Eli Polonsky]

> in this case, the cypher-lock door (singular - circa 1995)
> was very much incapable of being pulled from the door frame
> (singular). i think i recall the setup from when you were
> there (mid 80's) as i interviewed for one of the original
> (mid80's) wimex gigs.

I was hired as a board-op for a satellite oldies show in fall 1986, then finally in summer 1988 I became a "bargain" regular weekend overnight and fill-in weeknight/weekend morning DJ for four months in 1988. In other words, I was willing to do live radio for the same rate as board-op.

I had a blast on that station though, and it was a major market for my first commercial gig! I called myself "Eric Parker" (a generic sounding name with my real initials), as I was also doing non-commercial radio with my own name in a different format.

I was "let go" in a shakedown with a new PD in fall 1988. One year later, WMEX flipped from oldies to business news. After a multitude of call letter, format and ownership changes, it's now WTTT, conservative talk.

"Eric Parker" only appeared once again, playing oldies weeknight evenings on WKBR in Manchester, NH during their last four months as a live oldies station in 1990. After also many ownership and format changes (though they kept their heritage calls!), it's ironically now oldies again, though all bird after AM drive.

I sent some "Eric Parker" tapes out to a few oldies stations in the early 90's with no bites, and besides a little board-op at a defunct AM ethnic and religious station in '93/'94, I've done only various non-commercial radio as myself since then.

 

[Infidel]

> I remember locking myself out of the station one night while
> stepping out for a smoke, lucky I had a spare key in my car
> (car had touchpad). No worse feeling in all the world.
>

I locked myself out once, but the old credit card through the door trick worked, luckily.