STRANGE LISTENER COMPLAINTS

[dmargalotti]

I'm sure you all have your own stories and hopefully you'll share some of them hear. What are the oddest listeners complaints you've had over the years?

When I was working for a very family-oriented AC station, we got a really nasty letter about the Hall & Oats song "Rich Girl". The letter threatened boycotts and legal action, blah, blah, blah. I do believe my boss told her to switch to Howard Stern if she didn't like our programming.

Recently a listener to the Standards station where I work called to complain about songs with references to Spanish people (eg: Spanish Eyes by Al Martino). She said she was part of a group of people who are very concerned over the immigration issue and hearing songs like this was troubling and disturbing. Unbelievable but true!!!

Any others?

 

[PTBoardOp94]

1) "I could put on a better radio station in my chicken house"
2) "I would love to hear country music. I would love to hear football. JUST NOT AT THE SAME TIME!" (We were working with our computer to successfully automate the football, and it kept kicking the satellite country on)
3) You won't play this obscure George Jones tune. I'm going to start listening to [insert some other country station, she changed it up on us]

 

[gr8oldies]

The PC police in a college town called to say how they were "highly offended" by the playing of "Indian Giver".

(Is that Cowsills song now referring to "Native American Lake"?

 

[another_guy]

1) I'll never listen to your station again if you play anymore cat stevens, cuz he's a damn terrorist

 

[JeffMcDermott]

Back at the old Wave 97 WAEV, a leaning-toward-hot AC, one of our blah-blahs was "The V stands for Variety!" We probably played it before each lunar record, or something.

Referring to the tight rotation on the rest of the playlist, a listener called in after hours and left this simple message: "I think the V stands for Very Often!"

 

[PaulBWalkerJr]

Ok, this isn't tooo strange..

But, when I was volunteering at a public TV station.. someone caleld up and said, "You interupt regular programming, the stuff I like.. and think I should pledge money for this crap?"

 

[Surfer]

I worked for a station where we had a listener call up and wonder why we were talking politics instead of playing music. THIS WAS A NEWS/TALK STATION!!! :

 

[the undork]

Our small town country morning show was in the shadow of a much larger market and losing big time to it's much bigger and better financed heritage country station. We needed to make some changes to compete and hold our local audience, so we added more locally focused talk segments. The first morning around 6:30 a man who sounded older than God called up and said "You two (bleepin' bleepers) need to quit trying to be little Rush Limbaughs and just play music."

At the AC station in that same town, the PD was a friend of mine and told me about the following..."Your weather man didn't say there was going to be a freeze last night! My pipes burst and it's all your fault. You owe me $2000.00 to fix it, or I'LL SUE and put you out of business!!" NONE of the local weather people, to include the National Weather Service, saw the freeze coming, but it's all the local station's fault. Sheesh.

 

[dkocolin]

A listener emailed the GM of our college station to complain that a jock was saying our call letters too fast

 

[uppendowndadial]

I swear this is true: I got knocked off the air during a storm in New Orleans, and a listener called to ask what happened. I told her we got knocked off the air because of the thunderstorm, and she said "Well, why don't you make an announcement about it?"

 

[ol_dave]

I swear this is true: I got knocked off the air during a storm in New Orleans, and a listener called to ask what happened. I told her we got knocked off the air because of the thunderstorm, and she said "Well, why don't you make an announcement about it?"

Sorry, have to call BS on this one... straight out of a WKRP script

 

[PaulBWalkerJr]

I've heard too many stories like that to beleive all of 'em are fake.

 

[MojoInKansas]

I've had that kinda call as well. Either listeners can be THAT dumb, or they're screwing with me. Probably a combo of the two. LOL

 

[Jane-Ayne]

C'mon--everyone has had the calls that say:

"Hey, did you know you are off the air?"

"Why didn't you announce that you were off the air"

My fave was when a lady called the request line and asked us to "stop saying you are the Messiah."

Uh, okay. Thanks for listening.

Jane, his wife.

 

[KevinFodor]

If you're into country music, then you know Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett have had a hit lately with
the song "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere".

Not long ago our boss got an angry phone call from a listener who took us to task for playing "that dirty
song", and told him he had young children in the car and was embarrased when his children were exposed to "the dirty words" in the song.

Needless to say, my boss was dumbfounded as neither he, (nor anyone else at the station) could figure
out what "dirty words" were in the song. So, he asked the caller what words he was hearing...

The caller's response was to the effect of: "You know...the place in the song where they talk about "keeping it between the navigational beacons"...and the response is..."the boobies!"

My boss bit his tongue to keep from laughing as he explained to the caller that what is really said at that point in the song is: "the buoys" (that's what navigational beacons are called!) The caller's response was laughter, a bit of embarassment and an admission that he must have a dirty mind at that point!

We still laugh about that listener's confusion to this day.

 

[Robert Bass]

1. “That’s a load of crap that no one believes and you should not be broadcasting” (Response to a short segment by a licensed psychiatrist on the topic of keeping a positive outlook in your life. Essentially it was a misinterpretation on the listener’s part, because the perception was “Why should someone be thankful about having Cancer?” That’s not quite what the program’s guest meant. He was saying “Don’t contemplate on your faults, instead be thankful for all the good things about your life.)

2. ‘You’re playing the music so fast that I don’t recognize the singer’s voice even though I know the song! I challenge you to compare your source material in a high quality CD player against the CD player you are using.” (I know it’s somewhat common for some stations to speed up the music, but in this case that was not being done. The songs were ripped to a hard drive straight from a CD, as is.)

R

 

[MarcB]

Not exactly the same thing, but one time when I was an intern at WXCT I was in the GM's office talking to him. My walkman on set to WXCT, with the sound turned off. The GM's wife (who's the secretary/office manager) comes in and says to her husband "Do you know we're off the air?" He was like "What do you mean we're off the air?" She said that a listner called up and said the station was off the air. She went into the studio and came back a few minutes and says "We're back on the air now. The automaiton swithced the satellite reciever to the wrong channel." So anyway I just thought it was so funny that there were 3 people at the station - Me, The GM, and his wife and none of us knew the station was off the air. After his wife went back out to the lobby I said to the GM, "you can shoot me too. While I have the station on right now on my walkman, I have the sound turned off so I didn't know we were off the air."

The automation was supposed to switch over the station to Premire Radio Network for Dr. Laura, but it switched it to the wrong Premire Sat. Channel that wasn't broadcasting anything.

 

[jcolletta275]

The automation was supposed to switch over the station to Premire Radio Network for Dr. Laura, but it switched it to the wrong Premire Sat. Channel that wasn't broadcasting anything.

Hmm, that's interesting. One of my locals has, in the past, often had problems with their switcher changing from Rush Limbaugh to Dr. Laura... but not at a time when it was set to change (or at least it wasn't supposed to be set to change), it would switch in the middle of a segment.

Of course, this is the same station who, after receiving more than a reasonable number of complaints from several people, still couldn't cut the "You're listening to ABC News" off of the beginning of the pre-recorded network commercials they use on weekends.

I haven't had the opportunity to listen lately... working 3rd shift and all... so I don't know if either problem still lingers, but in the past both have been very annoying, recurring issues.

 

[amfmsw]

A listener complained that we were coming in throught his toaster. And that the music was coming out his light switches and telephone.

The station was AM 50000 watt with a three tower dogleg that beamed SE. His house, built AFTER the station, was in direct path of the equivelant of 150,000 watts directly through his house. We spent thousands trying to appease him. The only relief he got was at night, as the station was afraid of the dark, a daytimer!

 

[dmargalotti]

We had a listener that would call everytime we would play MAYBE THIS TIME by Liza Manelli. She would tell our morning guy that he was wrong...it wasn't Liza, it was Pia Zadora. The song was on a computer hard drive so the jock didn't have access to the actual source cd. He came and asked me the first time and I reassured him that it was indeed Liza (since I'm the one that dubbed the music to the hard drive and we don't have any Pia Zadora cd's).

Well the lady kept calling each time that song aired. Finally the morning guy got fed up and gave me her name and number and asked me to call her back. So I dug out the CD (blew off the dust) called her back, told her I was holding the CD in my hand and since I knew how to read I was positive it was Liza not Pia. I also offered to photo copy the CD jacket and send it to her if she still didn't believe me. Gee wiz, what a pain in the a@@ some people are!