Day #44 - 11/28/97 - 3:38PM

I went back on the air today for the first time in 44 days! I filled in for the morning guy at Lite 98 in Richmond. It was good to be back on the air, but it was kind of weird.

Firstly, I was totally by myself until around 8:17 when we did our first Metro Traffic report. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to talk to someone and banter. Doing a high-profile morning show, you get used to having folks to bounce things off of.

Secondly, it's a pretty low-key format and....

Thirdly, their darn computer went nuts on me about 40 minutes into the air-shift!

What they have is a computer system that lays out your music and spots in front of you. Simple enough, right? The CDs are stored in 4 different holder/player thingies and the spots are somewhere else. Anyway, one of the holder/player thingies (not accessible from the studio) decided not to holder/player worky. So, there I was trying to learn a new board, learn new phrases, insitute a format and keep it all together with my great personality WHILE trying to figure out why the #1 holder/player thingy didn't want to function.

I was the only one in the station besides an older fella' who was doing the morning show on the sister AM station. I just didn't get the impression he cared much about my holder/player thingies. The PD? Uh, he was out of town...so I couldn't call him. (Well, actually I tried but the number he left didn't seem to be working...) So, I called the engineer? I can tell you from experience that engineers LOVED to be called in the middle of a holiday weekend...especially when the blithering idiot on the other side of the phone is talking about a holder/player thingy. He got there..... at 9am. By that time I had already developed an alternate plan to working around the errant holder/player thingy.

Ya know what? Part-timers deserve MORE pay.