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.
1 comment:
Poor Stan. Now we know the real reason behind his departure.
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