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Pompous Airstaff

Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories flying!<P ID="signature">______________
Zach Morton
Chief Engineer
Basin Radio Network
Gillette, Wyoming</P>
 
Not airstaff, but had a sales person tell me that the "plants in the front lobby needed watering"

Yeah...I'll get right on that.



> Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought
> you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories
> flying!
>
 
> Not airstaff, but had a sales person tell me that the
> "plants in the front lobby needed watering"
>
> Yeah...I'll get right on that.
>
>
>
> > Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought
> > you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories
>
> > flying!
> >
>
I've had them complain about everything from light bulbs to tying up the little tree out front..."do you have any wire of some sort to keep the tree steady"...amongst others.<P ID="signature">______________
Zach Morton
Chief Engineer
Basin Radio Network
Gillette, Wyoming</P>
 
I always worshipped my engineers. I was fascinated with how radio worked, so maybe that's why they always brought me dinner.

I observed more 'moments of stupidity' than servant attitude. Like when the morning guy was convinced the processing was all screwed up, and couldn't 'hear' callers loud enough, etc.
Funny how when you switch your monitors from PGM to AIR it clears the problem. Not bad if the engineer is there, but when you wake him out of bed for this, it bites.

And of course, there is the jock who doesnt' hear anything, pushes the switch from AIR to PGM and continues to broadcast only to himself...then argues that we ARE on the air.

> Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought
> you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories
> flying!
>
 
> Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought
> you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories
> flying!
>

I try to be nice to our engineers, for example, always apologizing when I have to call them at home at night / on the weekends / in the early morning. Hell, a bunch of us in production got pizza today and we offered some to the CE since he was there way past when he was *supposed* to be off cleaning up after we took a lightning strike and several major power hits. (He actually declined since his wife had dinner waiting for him)

-A<P ID="signature">______________

</P>
 
> Not airstaff, but had a sales person tell me that the
> "plants in the front lobby needed watering"
>
> Yeah...I'll get right on that.
>
> Well......if you kept their toilets clean and unstopped they wouldn't be asking you to water the plants!After all.......just what DO you REALLY do anyway?

>
> > Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought
> > you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories
>
> > flying!
> >
>
 
> Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought
> you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories
> flying!

No airstaff problems, they like the engineer because they're quick to respond and good at explaining new equipment, etc.

However the GM has asked the engineer multiple times to empty his trash ... or when he comes back from a conference, he asks him to bring his bags in from the car!
 
From both sides

I have always made it a point to do at least a little swing shift work at every station I engineered. That has two pluses: You can see for yourself if something's not acting right, and it allows you to counter the "This crap doesn't work" argument by going into the air studio and proving on the air that it does work.

I used to have a morning jock / PD who would call me at 5 AM to yell about something not working, then tell me not to come in and disrupt his show, then hang up on me. The GM had a gem of an idea. He knew the guy got up at 4:00 AM, so he told me to call the morning guy about 3:00 AM every few days to tell him I'd been to the studio and everything was ready for his show. Worked great.

Then there was a morning jock who was known to take the ITC 3-deck cart machines and throw them down the hall when a cart jammed. Those things were heavy, too.

The thing that irked me up the most was jocks who didn't or wouldn't understand a piece of new gear, so they went into the air studio and screwed up on the air just to make thier point. In this instance it was an older talk show host who did not accept the new phone system. He screwed up caller after caller on the air. None of the other staff had any problems with it, and it became obvious he was doing it on purpose.

The GM took his side too, until the rest of the air staff and his own show producer stepped up and told the GM his morning host was full of it. Turns out alcohol was involved a bit.
<P ID="signature">______________
Never hold a cat and a dustbuster at the same time.</P>
 
> Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought
> you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories
> flying!
>

The morning team used to book gigs as party DJ's at high school dances and borrow the stations P.A. system consisting of this behemoth albatross frame on wheels with cart machines, amps, eq, plus a nice active crossover and cart storage. The thing weighed a ton, but had wheels on one end so you could wheel it around like a wheelbarrow. That, two big cabinet speakers and the cables and mikes made for a minimum of shlepping, and although developed for remotes, it mostly sat in the closet. One of the favorite tricks of these particular guys was to come back to the station after the gig, and leave it all in the van, so the next day I'd have a van full of stuff, and since I was the one needing the van to go for parts or out to the xmtr site, would get stuck unloading the stuff for them (they would always say "we'll do it when our shift is done ... oh, no, we have some production ... can it wait until 3 PM?") Finally after going to the GM with this problem, he told them "One more time and Andy gets $50 bucks out of your fee (the station billed the schools, so the money went through the station's books). It didn't faze them, so the next time it happened they got docked ... and it happened again and they got docked again ... finally, they wised up after losing $100 bucks. What really frosted me was one of them once said "What's the big deal? You don't have anything to do around here anyway."

I got them back good many times. It was after Thanksgiving and we were clearing
out the hay and the scarecrow from the reception area to make way for the fake Xmas tree and cheerily wrapped empty boxes. The scarecrow had been in the shop for a few days and pretty much out of mind. One morning I told the dynamic duo I had to work in the control room during their show, but it was on some equipment not related to their show. The console was in a stand/table with a 30 inch upper tier for equipment about 18 inches above the console. So as the clowns did their show, they could see me from about the top of my jeans to maybe the first few inches of my flannel shirt. I dragged my soldering station and some tools into the control room (I really did have something to do in there but I don't remember what it was) and began working. Now these guys were notorious for leaving the control room as soon as music was rolling and hang out in the reception area cracking jokes and meeting visitors (and wait for the warning light and run into the control room just in time ... surely you've met a few like this, no?). So, in cahoots with the news director, when they were away from the control room, I put my shirt on the scarecrow (which was already wearing jeans like I had on that day) and we shuffled the scarecrow from the shop to behind the console, raised the arms high enough as to not be seen from their vantage point, and both left the control room. They came back in at the warning light, did their break, said something to the scarecrow thinking it was me, and then left to return to the reception area. On the next break it happened almost exactly the same way. Then the third time, apparently having asked me (scarecrow) a question gone unanswered, one of them persisted, then got mad insinuating I was ignoring them, and came around the back of the console to confront me. My cohort in the news studio could see this all go down, and let them know he'd seen them talking to a scarecrow (and mentioned some small reference in his next newscast). Almost all of us laughed pretty hard that morning.

Hey I've got lots of true stories, but I felt this one fit the post.
<P ID="signature">______________
Electricity is really just organized lightning.
~George Carlin</P>
 
> Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought
> you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories
> flying!
>
Wait a minute...this is the same Zach Morton who worked at ABC Radio Networks in Dallas??? Where jocks/PDs there thought everyone else was below them?? (exceptions but few!)...and that included engineering???
CMON!!! WHO hasnt had that????

Add GM, MMs to that as well......engineers are treated like (BLEEP) by most until things break....but after it is fixed, the line is "We expected you to do that so no special thanks"
 
> > Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought
> > you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories
>
> > flying!
> >
> Wait a minute...this is the same Zach Morton who worked at
> ABC Radio Networks in Dallas??? Where jocks/PDs there
> thought everyone else was below them?? (exceptions but
> few!)...and that included engineering???
> CMON!!! WHO hasnt had that????
>
> Add GM, MMs to that as well......engineers are treated like
> (BLEEP) by most until things break....but after it is fixed,
> the line is "We expected you to do that so no special
> thanks"
>

Yes, the same person! And remember...I had about as much pull as a train that was out of gas on the tracks.

<P ID="signature">______________
Zach Morton
Chief Engineer
Basin Radio Network
Gillette, Wyoming</P>
 
damn bird

So the heating system failed overnight and the receptionist came to work
in the morning to find her damned parakeet (WYNGIE) feet-up in the bottom
of the cage.

Wanted me to carry the carcass someplace warm to see if it would thaw out.

Just for the hell of it, stuck it in the studio rack for an hour and
gave it back to her with the suggestion that she give it mouth-to-mouth
quickly before it cooled off again. She couldn't get just the beak,
so she stuck the bird's head in her month and puffed away it for about
10-minutes. It didn't breathe...just damn near inflated!

And, yes, but purely by coincidence, she was a blonde at the time.<P ID="signature">______________
lesahab.jpg
Due to underwhelming popular demand...</P>
 
Re: damn bird

> So the heating system failed overnight and the receptionist
> came to work
> in the morning to find her damned parakeet (WYNGIE) feet-up
> in the bottom
> of the cage.
>
> Wanted me to carry the carcass someplace warm to see if it
> would thaw out.
>
> Just for the hell of it, stuck it in the studio rack for an
> hour and
> gave it back to her with the suggestion that she give it
> mouth-to-mouth
> quickly before it cooled off again. She couldn't get just
> the beak,
> so she stuck the bird's head in her month and puffed away it
> for about
> 10-minutes. It didn't breathe...just damn near inflated!
>
> And, yes, but purely by coincidence, she was a blonde at the
> time.
>
Now that's a damn good story.....wish you had some video.......
 
Re: From both sides

Someone in our sales department had the bright idea of making these "halloween Houses". They would sell them to clients who would decorate the "houses" with the particular logo of that company, and host the "house" at a big halloween event. They were giant slabs of ply wood in the shape of a house, with a two by 4 in the back of them to keep them propped up. Of course it was up to me to haul the damn things around to the clients, and then to the event. And since they had no other place to store them, they ended up in one of my transmitter buildings in the way of everything.

The next year when I refused to cart them around again, one of the sales managers/team leaders or what ever they wanted to call themselves that day, did it herself. In the process she managed to bust the door off of the transmitter building.

I'm hoping they don't use these damn things again this year. If they don't I will be hosting a bon fire at the transmitter site! That may actually happen before they get the chance!

Oh and another slightly different topic: Does it seem like having the internet down is worse than being off the air? We can be off the air for a few hours and it's "no big deal" but if the GM dosent have internet access at 7am, he would wonder why I wasn't there working on it!
 
Ummm... remember, it IS an engineer's job to fix things. If things didn't break, there wouldn't be any full-time engineers, everyone would be doing consulting for build outs.

Don't lose sight of your primary responsibility... to FIX THINGS THAT BREAK.

> > > Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who
> thought
> > > you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the
> stories
> >
> > > flying!
> > >
> > Wait a minute...this is the same Zach Morton who worked at
>
> > ABC Radio Networks in Dallas??? Where jocks/PDs there
> > thought everyone else was below them?? (exceptions but
> > few!)...and that included engineering???
> > CMON!!! WHO hasnt had that????
> >
> > Add GM, MMs to that as well......engineers are treated
> like
> > (BLEEP) by most until things break....but after it is
> fixed,
> > the line is "We expected you to do that so no special
> > thanks"
> >
>
> Yes, the same person! And remember...I had about as much
> pull as a train that was out of gas on the tracks.
>
 
> Has anyone ever been faced with a disc jockey who thought
> you were his own personal servant?? Let's get the stories
> flying!
>
The problem with all of the stories that I have about this are so really WILD that some are going to say "That can Not be true", BUT al of this is true.
With that said here is one that happened to me, I was the chief engineer at a station with 4 sgtations in the same studio building, a nice building with 3 stories, the stations were on the bottom floor, and the other space on the 2nd and 3rd floors were rented out office space. the station owner owned the building, and rented out office space on these two floors.
All of the offices on these floors had really nice blinds on all of the windows.
One day I was at one of the transmitter sites working on one of the main transm,itters as a storm had taken out the main transmitter and we were operating on an aux one. my cell rings and it is the G.M. back at the studio, telling me that the blinds in one of the offices was messed up in some way, I explamied to him that I was at one of the transmitter sites working on a transmitter, But he told me that the people renting that office space MUST have this fixed NOW. I gtold him that I would get there after I got the main gtransmitter back on the air, and he got mad, and said that he was calling the owner and hung up on me. As I dod more work on the transmitter my cell rang again this time it was the owner lof the stations, and he told me that I was to get to the studio and fix these blinds RIGHT NOE, I explained to him that we were on an aux transmitter and I was working of the main, BUT he told me that I could do that anytime.
I dropped everything and went to the studio and looked at the blinds and called a blinds company to come and fix them. then I went into the owneras office and had many suggestions for him as to where he could place the blinds.
 
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