Sunday, February 24, 2008
Crisis 4: People Keep Bugging Me (From 6 Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)
One of the more negative aspects of a Membership Coordinator's job is other people; other staff members, mainly, but also sometimes the on-air guests who come in through the wrong door; ie the office door, ie the door by my office - instead of the right door, ie the back door, ie the door I never have to see or think about.
I made it a point to be as rude and unhelpful as possible to any musicians who came in through the office door - I despise musicians generally, they tend to be completely uninteresting in person and would always, always, ask to use the bathroom and when I would direct them to the bathroom on the other side of the building - the public bathroom - they would inevitably stop and use the private bathroom, the bathroom two steps from my office door, the staff bathroom, operated and maintained by the Membership Department - MY bathroom; my refuge, Fortress of Solitude, Sancta Sanctorum...One of the main reasons I stayed at the station as long as I did.
But that was the permanent new station, not the temporary new station, which had only one bathroom except for the secret bathroom upstairs that only myself and the homeless fellows who rented the personal storage units ever used. They often used the station's bathroom, downstairs, because the storage facility and the station shared a hallway and when Annabelle (name changed, I think, because I can't remember her actual name) the manager of the storage facility and the building as a whole would hand the fellows the keys to the secret bathroom upstairs they would walk down the hall and turn right and at that point her detailed instructions to them for reaching the upstairs secret bathroom probably got a little murky in their poor addled heads because the station's bathroom was actually on the route to the secret bathroom...so they usually stopped and used the station's bathroom...And often locked the door behind them when they left...So that often we on staff thought that someone was using it when someone wasn't...
But to be honest, the bathroom situation at the temporary new station was an improvement over the bathroom situation at the old permanent station on 8th South, because at the old permanent station we shared a bathroom with Community Action Program (name not changed, I think). Actually, we didn't share a bathroom with CAP because they used their own restrooms inside their offices - they let us use their client bathroom - so we shared a bathroom with the CAP's clients, which were predominantly homeless people. So you can see why I loved the Membership Bathroom in the permanent new station, and called it my preeeesssshusss, and why I hated it when Musicians used it.
But on to the crisis, beginning at the temporary new station and continuing at the permanent new station, wherein my boss, Betty (name changed) became obsessed with the time I came in to work every day, and brought it up every time we met to evaluate my job performance and come to think of it every staff meeting. We both agonized over it. She would bring it up and I would shake my head sadly and she would ask impertinent questions about my personal wake up rituals and I would make up things to tell her about them and shake my head sadly and she would say that bosses out in the Real World weren't as lenient about tardiness as we were here at Hippy Central, and I would shake my head sadly and wonder where she thought I'd been getting my paychecks from before I started working at Hippy Central.
Of course, if I looked deeply within myself, and I often did during private moments (see sancta sanctorum, notes, above), and looked my inner self squarely in the eye and told myself what I thought and asked my inner self how that sat with him, I would realize that I never came to work on time because I never got up in the morning on time, and I never got up on time because I kept myself up for hours with my nighttime rituals but also because also because I didn't want to get up on time because I hated most of my job...
IE everything but the radio spots I got to voice and write, of which we only did 5 or 6 a year but into which 300 to 360 seconds of on-air announcement time per year I would put about 95.5% of the total mental effort I put into my job per year -
Every 6 months Betty would bring up the pre-thon mailings and tell Stan we had to do a promo, and Stan would ask me if I wanted to write a promo, knowing that he recorded about ten announcements every day, for various programs and public service announcements and underwriting announcements and was always asking different volunteers to come in and voice them, and I would say yes, kind of off-handedly, like I'd try to fit it in...
And then I'd fret and think about it, and try to think about other things, and then after a few weeks, and after Stan had recorded about 100 little 60 second announcements since he'd asked me to write the one promo, he'd come to me and ask me if I'd written the promo and I'd say it was mostly done and he'd say we had to record it that morning and I'd tell him I had to finish it and we'd have to do it tomorrow and he'd say no, we had to do it that morning and I'd pound my desk and curse him and plead for more time and he'd say after lunch was fine...
And I'd begin writing and re-writing the one-page of dialogue and re-think it, and erase it all and re-write it again, and by 2:30 that afternoon Stan would saunter by my office and tell me we had to record it and I'd say it wasn't done and he'd say "just bring what you got" and we'd go back to the recording studio and he'd look at the print-outs that had my little hand-written notes all over them and he'd frown and say; "I can't read this...what's this?" And I'd try to re-write a few lines there in the room and Stan would look at it again and frown and shake his head and look at his watch and roll his eyes and tell me to get behind the mic and ask me to read some of it and I would and he would look more and more perplexed and finally curse; "Someone's been messing around with my levels again!"
And he'd curse the nameless volunteer who'd fiddled with the dial that had a sticky-note written by Stan on it that said "Do Not Touch This Dial" and he'd stand up and fiddle with another control thingy and sit down and ask me to say something into the mic again and I would and he'd look at his watch and finally shrug and go out of the room and shout up into the Development Office for Cathy and she would say; "Is it ready?" because she knew nothing was really written and he'd tell her we were ready and she'd come down and she'd read her part with high energy and enthusiasm and I'd kind of mumble and Stan would frown and adjust his knobs and tell us to go again and Cathy would look pissed and shout her stuff and I would ponder the nuances of the script that I hadn't really written and try to bring some real feeling to the whole idea of a person asking someone else for a pre-thon donation and Stan would tell us to do it again and again, and Cathy would look pissed and just kind of mumble her part and look at me confused and ask what the point was and we'd have an argument and Stan would roll his eyes and look at his watch and then he'd just say; "that's fine. But mention the address."
And I'd curse and plead and pound the table in the studio and say the address wasn't important, so Stan would record Cathy mumbling the address, and then I'd have a fantastic idea for a joke, and write the joke at the end, and describe it to Stan and Cathy, and we'd record the joke at the end, and Stan would scowl and tell us we were two seconds over and I'd curse and plead and pound the table and say the two seconds weren't important and Stan would look mortally and permanently offended at the notion that he would personally as a radio professional ever stoop to engineering a 62-second radio announcement, the sloppiness of it would revolt him like a turd in his hat and he would sooner die than put it on...
And he'd poke around with the sound file, and have me re-record some of it, and then Cathy would look at her watch and say she had to go and I'd plead with her to stay and she'd leave and Stan would roll his eyes and tell me he had to cut the punchline of the joke, which would make the joke not a joke and I'd throw my hands up to heaven to plead with Jesus to come down and denounce him before all the angels and plead and pound the table and he'd tell me it didn't matter because I'd mumbled the punchline anyway and then he'd suggest another joke and I'd wince and suggest something else that would add ten seconds to the running time and there was just no possible way and I'd suggest we re-record and we'd fumble around and I'd begin to see spots and experience angina symptoms and claw at the studio door like a trapped animal and then Stan would shrug and say he'd slap something together and tell me I could go and I'd wring my hands and look at him suspiciously and try to see what he was doing and he'd get annoyed and tell me it was fine...
And later by 5:00 or so after I'd hung around the studio door trying to mentally disassociate myself from the announcement and hope I never heard it played on air Stan would call me in to listen to it and it would be so altered from the original script that I'd seriously wonder about Stan's sanity or my sanity and I'd stare at the crumbled, damp scraps of the script in my hand and avoid Stan's eyes while it played and try not to say how much I hated it, and Stan would shake his head and tell me it was funny, especially the part before the joke, and he'd go back in the studio to slap together about 15 underwriting announcements before he went home, and I'd stagger back to my office and Cathy would come by and ask me if I'd put the mailing together and I'd tell her no because I was a broken man and couldn't possibly try to fiddle around with that damn database program at the moment and she'd look pissed and frustrated and near tears and stomp back up to her office on the second floor, and two weeks later we'd record another one and then I'd take a welcome rest for 6 months before the next Radiothon.
Crisis Resolved: Betty told me that my shift was now 9:30 to 5:30 instead of 9 to 5, and after this move I was seldom more than 15 minutes late.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Crisis 3: No One is Nurturing My Personal Creative Vision (From 6 Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)
We moved to the temporary new station on 500 West by the Homeless Shelter sometime in 1999, I think. I'm a bit hazy on exact dates, but I think it must have been 1999 because I think the tornado that wrecked the Sun and attacked the Delta Center (In Vain, Unbelievers!) occurred in 1999.
I remember the day well, and as a fascinating digression I will tell the tale of my own brush with the Power of Nature embodied by the human fear reponse: That day I walked out the front door of the station and down the stairs into the tiny parking lot that had been fenced off from the gigantic parking lots used by our neighbors and walked to my car. I think I may have been retrieving my lunch or some change or something. As I walked to my car I noticed that there seemed to be a bit of wind, and rather large bits of garbage, papers and leaves and such blowing around in our parking lot.
I glanced across 5th West at the Homeless Shelter, where you could sometimes see the fellows wandering around in the small bit of lawn under the grim blank wall that was the west side of the Shelter on the other side of the street. There were a few trees growing in that bit of lawn, against the side of the wall, under which the fellows at times reposed.
As I looked, I noticed that the trees were swaying back and forth in the wind with a surprising radius and speed of motion for plants of that size and wooden firmness, and then observed one of the trees falling all the way over onto a car parked at the side of the lawn.
Somewhat startled by this, and noticing a great deal of movement to my left, I turned my head north to observe a maelstrom of flying pieces of garbage of unusual size and disturbing heft right across 200 West not a few dozen yards away from me...
I have no memory of running back up the steps and through the front doors of the station and all the way down the long hallway by the admin offices and around the bathroom and down the rest of the long hallway past the green room all the way to the break room about a half mile into the building in about 2.5 seconds, but I must have done that because that's where I came to my senses as I hyperventilated out of my system whatever ancient, potent hormones had gripped my brain and energized my legs, now shaking and weak from the effort of carrying my 240 pound frame at near Olympic speed out of harm's way.
Also sometime in 1999, right before the Spring radiothon, an ugly financial crisis had reared its head, and the board had complained and Bart, the GM, had resigned, and the board had made Betty the GM, and Linda had resigned, and Betty had made Cathy (name changed) the Development Director and my boss. I approved of these changes, even though I liked Bart a lot. He'd been suspicious of me, but I tend to judge other people solely on their quality as entertainment, and Bart had been terrifically entertaining for me personally, taking me into his office for long rambling discussions, taking me and other staffers to a local bar that offered a "Lingerie Lunch" (I won't describe it), and enthusiastically complimenting me for my new haircut (shaved my head for various personal reasons, but I averred it was in admiration for his own shiny pate).
Later on, the board treasurer, Natalya (name changed) discovered after much investigation the whereabouts of a not-insignificant amount of money (about 10% the station's operating budget) that had been mis-laid. This considerably improved the station's financial outlook, and gave Betty quite a boost at the beginning of her tenure as GM, but Natalya convinced the rest of the board that the GM - or any one person - should not have sign-off authority for checks on the station's account. This meant that all checks - and staff paychecks - required two signatures, and meant that at least once every two weeks someone from staff, often myself, had to drive around town looking for a board member to sign some checks. I'm sure that Betty regarded this as a somewhat obnoxious degree of oversight - I certainly did because I hated driving around after people, and felt she was being punished for the mistakes of previous GMs.
Since then, with experience with other non-profits, I have come to see the wisdom in this level of board oversight. No GM or Exec. Director should ever have single-signing authority over checks drawn from donated funds. But at the time it was a pain in the bum.
I also experienced in 1999 another of my periodic spasms of anguish over my rights to creative expression in the workplace. By which I mean I didn't like my job duties, which I've already described, and wanted the opportunity to "create", as they call it in school. I don't think I voiced these desires to anyone else on staff, choosing to express my restlessness and discontent by pretending to sleep during staff meetings and hiding the windex from a certain OCD volunteer who'd called me "an insect" when I'd walked into the on-air studio during her show.
I remember the day well, and as a fascinating digression I will tell the tale of my own brush with the Power of Nature embodied by the human fear reponse: That day I walked out the front door of the station and down the stairs into the tiny parking lot that had been fenced off from the gigantic parking lots used by our neighbors and walked to my car. I think I may have been retrieving my lunch or some change or something. As I walked to my car I noticed that there seemed to be a bit of wind, and rather large bits of garbage, papers and leaves and such blowing around in our parking lot.
I glanced across 5th West at the Homeless Shelter, where you could sometimes see the fellows wandering around in the small bit of lawn under the grim blank wall that was the west side of the Shelter on the other side of the street. There were a few trees growing in that bit of lawn, against the side of the wall, under which the fellows at times reposed.
As I looked, I noticed that the trees were swaying back and forth in the wind with a surprising radius and speed of motion for plants of that size and wooden firmness, and then observed one of the trees falling all the way over onto a car parked at the side of the lawn.
Somewhat startled by this, and noticing a great deal of movement to my left, I turned my head north to observe a maelstrom of flying pieces of garbage of unusual size and disturbing heft right across 200 West not a few dozen yards away from me...
I have no memory of running back up the steps and through the front doors of the station and all the way down the long hallway by the admin offices and around the bathroom and down the rest of the long hallway past the green room all the way to the break room about a half mile into the building in about 2.5 seconds, but I must have done that because that's where I came to my senses as I hyperventilated out of my system whatever ancient, potent hormones had gripped my brain and energized my legs, now shaking and weak from the effort of carrying my 240 pound frame at near Olympic speed out of harm's way.
Also sometime in 1999, right before the Spring radiothon, an ugly financial crisis had reared its head, and the board had complained and Bart, the GM, had resigned, and the board had made Betty the GM, and Linda had resigned, and Betty had made Cathy (name changed) the Development Director and my boss. I approved of these changes, even though I liked Bart a lot. He'd been suspicious of me, but I tend to judge other people solely on their quality as entertainment, and Bart had been terrifically entertaining for me personally, taking me into his office for long rambling discussions, taking me and other staffers to a local bar that offered a "Lingerie Lunch" (I won't describe it), and enthusiastically complimenting me for my new haircut (shaved my head for various personal reasons, but I averred it was in admiration for his own shiny pate).
Later on, the board treasurer, Natalya (name changed) discovered after much investigation the whereabouts of a not-insignificant amount of money (about 10% the station's operating budget) that had been mis-laid. This considerably improved the station's financial outlook, and gave Betty quite a boost at the beginning of her tenure as GM, but Natalya convinced the rest of the board that the GM - or any one person - should not have sign-off authority for checks on the station's account. This meant that all checks - and staff paychecks - required two signatures, and meant that at least once every two weeks someone from staff, often myself, had to drive around town looking for a board member to sign some checks. I'm sure that Betty regarded this as a somewhat obnoxious degree of oversight - I certainly did because I hated driving around after people, and felt she was being punished for the mistakes of previous GMs.
Since then, with experience with other non-profits, I have come to see the wisdom in this level of board oversight. No GM or Exec. Director should ever have single-signing authority over checks drawn from donated funds. But at the time it was a pain in the bum.
I also experienced in 1999 another of my periodic spasms of anguish over my rights to creative expression in the workplace. By which I mean I didn't like my job duties, which I've already described, and wanted the opportunity to "create", as they call it in school. I don't think I voiced these desires to anyone else on staff, choosing to express my restlessness and discontent by pretending to sleep during staff meetings and hiding the windex from a certain OCD volunteer who'd called me "an insect" when I'd walked into the on-air studio during her show.
Crisis Resolved:
I experienced the ego-fulfillment and narcissistic joy of hearing my voice on the radio, begging for listener money in 60 second spots engineered by Stan and conceived by Cathy as an attempt to increase mail-in donations by casting me myself as a bumbling but loveable, heart-in-the-right-place type of character that I found hilarious until I realized that nobody thought of it as a "character" as in something made up. Then I stopped finding it hilarious, but I kept doing the spots, and I finally understood the people you see on TV and in sporting events that dress in the funny animal suits and jump on little trampolines and don't seem to ever understand or maybe care how despised they are because no one sees your face.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Crisis 2: Are My Hands Too Soft For Real Work? (Part 2; Six Crises, Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)
After I'd begun working at the station for a while, after my first Radiothon (which began 8 days after my first day at work, 9/11/98), and after I'd finished entering pledge forms from the Radiothon into the incredibly disorganized and inaccurate Membership Database, and after I'd apologized to everyone for taking so long to enter the pledge forms into the database...
And after I'd begun to realize that the little cards stapled to the pledge forms that I'd ignored were meant for me to look at, and read, and listed the thank-you gifts that the donors had pledged for, and were expecting in their mailbox, and after I'd apologized to the donors for not getting those gifts, and asked them to swing by and I'd give them the t-shirt in person, and after they'd swung by the station and shook everyone's hand and I'd taken them back to the premium closet and showed them the KRCL t-shirt and they'd taken a good long look and asked me what else there was and I showed them the horribly tacky little clocks on CDs and they'd smile gently and leave...
And after all that I began to notice at the staff meetings that while I was doodling in my yellow legal pad and listening to Betty (name changed) and Linda (name changed) fight that every once in a while against my will I would hear about actual station business, something about a Capital Campaign that I thought had something to do with state politics and another thing about a "new station" somewhere that Lewis and Felix were building, and Stan (name changed) would mention to Bart (name changed) that he'd dropped by the New Station and talked about blah blah and wiring to Lewis and something something more about the wiring...
And Lewis the Engineer would sometimes come to the staff meetings and talk authoritatively about the work on the new station, and look around disparagingly at the staff and shake his head sadly, and I gathered from Bart the GM that Lewis did this because he and Felix were performing a lot of constructing and wiring the new station type-work pro bono, or free, as they say, and that the pansy office staff didn't seem too interested in coming out and pitching in because maybe they were worried that they might hurt their baby-soft lily-white itsy-bitsy widdow hands or something to that general frigging effect, and looking down his engineer glasses at the miserable specimens around him at the staff meetings with something to that effect behind his poker face and baleful, practical, what-the-hell-do-you-office-people-do-all-day-anyway looks he kept giving us that I was missing while I drew funny pictures of Lewis as an otter with glasses and Bart as a walrus with nicotine patches on his flippers and Linda as a barky little pug with bug-eyes snarling at Betty as a mean alley-cat who kept licking her claws and pretending to ignore the little dog while she sat there as close enough to the little dog's food dish as it is possible to do without driving a little dog completely out of its tiny little mind.
So when I heard that maybe the office staff was expected to come out do their part with the wires and hammers I got a roiling knot in my stomach, which is the seat of my soul and barometer of my innermost feelings, and would do mental exercises to calm and focus all my energies on the doodles, but I knew that eventually I would be expected to wield a hammer and prayed that it would be nothing too technical or handyman type stuff, and I could smack a few walls with it and get out.
And then one day Betty said at a meeting "Have you seen the new place?" and I eventually gathered that she meant me or Cheri (name changed), or me and Cheri, the administrative assistant who came in for 20 hours a week or so and typed pledge forms and answered the phone and mailed out t-shirts to donors so I wouldn't have to and could focus on the bigger membership picture like wondering if she was single or if the woman at the burger shop up the street was single, or if her mother who owned burger shop up the street would have forgotten about the bounced checks by now...
So I eventually gathered that Betty was talking to me and they all agreed that Cheri and I should see the new station which I eventually gathered was not the real "new station" but was only the temporary new station because the real new station had not yet been purchased by the Capital Campaign.
And so we did, and so we went one day out to the temporary new station located in the same building as a self-storage facility that serviced the men of the homeless shelter next door and that they occasionally used as a party pad for individual parties in their own 5 x 5 storage units that contained everything they owned including maybe some party liquid to imbibe alone in the 5 x 5 party unit which they would sometimes pass out in.
It looked like crap, and it was grimy and I wished I'd drawn it because some things you can't describe and the portion of the building that KRCL would use was all along one hallway about 500 feet long and 10 feet wide and could not possibly have passed fire code. When we got there Lewis handed us gloves and I didn't get a hammer but Lewis did enjoy taking me up to the roof that you reached by a ladder over a stairwell and if you didn't fear heights like I do you'd have been only mildly queasy climbing it.
We hauled garbage or something for a few hours and Lewis let us go after establishing to himself that we would really be of no practical help whatsoever since we didn't understand wiring except for Stan anyway and what else where we going to do there? But we did get to go down into the basement of the storage place which is one of the creepiest places in the city with a low ceiling and crumbling brick walls and storage places like little rooms and there are little creepy objects here and there like pieces of dolls that say "Eee eee eee" to you silently in your mind and other garbage and long passageways but I never drew that either but it's okay because I still sometimes have nightmares about it as a memory tool.
Crisis Resolved:
We moved into the new station and I ended up helping Stan "soundproof" the new on-air studio!! Which was an honor because somewhere in the middle of my first radiothon when I'd work from 11 am to late in the morning and spend most of the night hours talking to the volunteer nighttime DJs I began to love them and their music and I fell in love with the station like a dizzy schoolgirl and wrote my name "Andrew KRCL" like we were married in my notebook by the animal pictures and pictures of Linda eating excretions...
So I felt honored to drag fiberglass insulation, which is miserable material to work with because it leaves un-biological fibers all over your skin that slowly work inside and poison your system forever and never degrade and are immortal while you die all around them, to drag that poisonous stuff up ladders and into the ceiling space above the tiles with Stan and we worked and sweated for hours and hours in that miserable room, which was far far bigger than any other on-air radio studio I've ever seen for no reason at all, and we finished with the insulation and got down off our ladders and Stan momentously closed the door and said; "Let's see how it sounds" and you couldn't hear a needle drop between the two of us as we listened to the silence of Perfect Soundproofing for exactly 1.5 seconds before we heard crystal clear like he was hack-coughing between us the sound of Bart clearing his tobacco-clogged lungs and throat about 500 yards away up the long hallway in his office at the front of the building and Stan shrugged and said "It'll be fine."
And after I'd begun to realize that the little cards stapled to the pledge forms that I'd ignored were meant for me to look at, and read, and listed the thank-you gifts that the donors had pledged for, and were expecting in their mailbox, and after I'd apologized to the donors for not getting those gifts, and asked them to swing by and I'd give them the t-shirt in person, and after they'd swung by the station and shook everyone's hand and I'd taken them back to the premium closet and showed them the KRCL t-shirt and they'd taken a good long look and asked me what else there was and I showed them the horribly tacky little clocks on CDs and they'd smile gently and leave...
And after all that I began to notice at the staff meetings that while I was doodling in my yellow legal pad and listening to Betty (name changed) and Linda (name changed) fight that every once in a while against my will I would hear about actual station business, something about a Capital Campaign that I thought had something to do with state politics and another thing about a "new station" somewhere that Lewis and Felix were building, and Stan (name changed) would mention to Bart (name changed) that he'd dropped by the New Station and talked about blah blah and wiring to Lewis and something something more about the wiring...
And Lewis the Engineer would sometimes come to the staff meetings and talk authoritatively about the work on the new station, and look around disparagingly at the staff and shake his head sadly, and I gathered from Bart the GM that Lewis did this because he and Felix were performing a lot of constructing and wiring the new station type-work pro bono, or free, as they say, and that the pansy office staff didn't seem too interested in coming out and pitching in because maybe they were worried that they might hurt their baby-soft lily-white itsy-bitsy widdow hands or something to that general frigging effect, and looking down his engineer glasses at the miserable specimens around him at the staff meetings with something to that effect behind his poker face and baleful, practical, what-the-hell-do-you-office-people-do-all-day-anyway looks he kept giving us that I was missing while I drew funny pictures of Lewis as an otter with glasses and Bart as a walrus with nicotine patches on his flippers and Linda as a barky little pug with bug-eyes snarling at Betty as a mean alley-cat who kept licking her claws and pretending to ignore the little dog while she sat there as close enough to the little dog's food dish as it is possible to do without driving a little dog completely out of its tiny little mind.
So when I heard that maybe the office staff was expected to come out do their part with the wires and hammers I got a roiling knot in my stomach, which is the seat of my soul and barometer of my innermost feelings, and would do mental exercises to calm and focus all my energies on the doodles, but I knew that eventually I would be expected to wield a hammer and prayed that it would be nothing too technical or handyman type stuff, and I could smack a few walls with it and get out.
And then one day Betty said at a meeting "Have you seen the new place?" and I eventually gathered that she meant me or Cheri (name changed), or me and Cheri, the administrative assistant who came in for 20 hours a week or so and typed pledge forms and answered the phone and mailed out t-shirts to donors so I wouldn't have to and could focus on the bigger membership picture like wondering if she was single or if the woman at the burger shop up the street was single, or if her mother who owned burger shop up the street would have forgotten about the bounced checks by now...
So I eventually gathered that Betty was talking to me and they all agreed that Cheri and I should see the new station which I eventually gathered was not the real "new station" but was only the temporary new station because the real new station had not yet been purchased by the Capital Campaign.
And so we did, and so we went one day out to the temporary new station located in the same building as a self-storage facility that serviced the men of the homeless shelter next door and that they occasionally used as a party pad for individual parties in their own 5 x 5 storage units that contained everything they owned including maybe some party liquid to imbibe alone in the 5 x 5 party unit which they would sometimes pass out in.
It looked like crap, and it was grimy and I wished I'd drawn it because some things you can't describe and the portion of the building that KRCL would use was all along one hallway about 500 feet long and 10 feet wide and could not possibly have passed fire code. When we got there Lewis handed us gloves and I didn't get a hammer but Lewis did enjoy taking me up to the roof that you reached by a ladder over a stairwell and if you didn't fear heights like I do you'd have been only mildly queasy climbing it.
We hauled garbage or something for a few hours and Lewis let us go after establishing to himself that we would really be of no practical help whatsoever since we didn't understand wiring except for Stan anyway and what else where we going to do there? But we did get to go down into the basement of the storage place which is one of the creepiest places in the city with a low ceiling and crumbling brick walls and storage places like little rooms and there are little creepy objects here and there like pieces of dolls that say "Eee eee eee" to you silently in your mind and other garbage and long passageways but I never drew that either but it's okay because I still sometimes have nightmares about it as a memory tool.
Crisis Resolved:
We moved into the new station and I ended up helping Stan "soundproof" the new on-air studio!! Which was an honor because somewhere in the middle of my first radiothon when I'd work from 11 am to late in the morning and spend most of the night hours talking to the volunteer nighttime DJs I began to love them and their music and I fell in love with the station like a dizzy schoolgirl and wrote my name "Andrew KRCL" like we were married in my notebook by the animal pictures and pictures of Linda eating excretions...
So I felt honored to drag fiberglass insulation, which is miserable material to work with because it leaves un-biological fibers all over your skin that slowly work inside and poison your system forever and never degrade and are immortal while you die all around them, to drag that poisonous stuff up ladders and into the ceiling space above the tiles with Stan and we worked and sweated for hours and hours in that miserable room, which was far far bigger than any other on-air radio studio I've ever seen for no reason at all, and we finished with the insulation and got down off our ladders and Stan momentously closed the door and said; "Let's see how it sounds" and you couldn't hear a needle drop between the two of us as we listened to the silence of Perfect Soundproofing for exactly 1.5 seconds before we heard crystal clear like he was hack-coughing between us the sound of Bart clearing his tobacco-clogged lungs and throat about 500 yards away up the long hallway in his office at the front of the building and Stan shrugged and said "It'll be fine."
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Crisis 1: Hating My Boss after 1st Day (From Six Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)
KRCL, DAY ONE:
My new boss Linda (name changed), the station's development director, took me to lunch on my first day and told me, confidentially, just between the two of us, that my predecessor had been really terrible to her and she'd been ready to fire her...She assured me that she was perfectly willing to fire someone if she had to. I think she felt she had to tell me that because my friend was the chair of the board of directors and I might feel untouchable and have an attitude...
But I really was untouchable and I knew it and had gotten the job in the first place because my friend was the chair of the board of directors and I knew this and I knew she knew this and I didn't take her at all seriously, but since I was also friends with my predecessor I felt grossly insulted by her remarks and disliked her intensely from that moment on and had a terrible attitude about any work she gave me, which after a while was not very much.
And the actual job consisted of mostly grappling with a miserably unpleasant DOS program called Memsys (that I eventually grew to love and admire after years of dating) and giving donors who walked into the station their t-shirts and weird thank-you gifts and of answering the phone, mostly incredibly easy tasks which I routinely failed to perform well if at all, and I spent most of my time avoiding Linda, and ignoring the phone, and talking to the volunteer DJs while they performed their 3 hour on-air shifts.
Crisis Resolved:
After only a few weeks at the station I realized that almost everyone associated with the station hated my boss Linda even more than I did, she was universally loathed as a miserably unpleasant, controlling, and half-witted toad, and had even had people hurl cups of coffee into her office and scream at her in public meetings. She'd kept her job by smoking with Bart (name changed), the General Manager at the time, and by viciously fighting with Betty (name changed) at staff meetings so Bart wouldn't have to. Toward the end of her tenure, Linda had become so powerless that I remember telling her I had done nothing to prepare an ill-considered mailing that she'd asked me to prepare, and I remember telling her this with I am now ashamed to say an inordinate amount of glee. Linda left when Betty was made GM. Weeks after she'd left, Betty went to me and as a final turn of the screw asked me to call Linda up and tell her she owed the station money for some questionable purchases she'd made on account the previous month.
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