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."