All professions have their accompanying anxiety-dreams, but those suffered by people who work in #radio often have a certain uniformity to them. Typified by a programmer’s eternal battle against DEAD AIR, these dreams almost always revolve around a very particular and urgent need to *get*something*no*make*that*ANYTHING* on the air, only you can’t because all of the records have been replaced by high school science textbooks, the engineer has installed parking meters on all of the equipment and you have no loose change with which to operate them, or someone has dug a moat around the music library that's filled with beasts who will surely attack if you attempt to retrieve a copy of #Faust IV so that your listeners might thrill to all twelve brain-frying minutes of the song #Krautrock. For people in my orbit, all of this is old news. The radio anxiety dream is a tale as old as time itself.
That said, I had one the other night which I think rides in a different class and is worth re-telling here thanks to its more universal themes.
There was a #WPRB staff meeting taking place in the lobby of a very large and busy hospital. Our designated area had been partitioned off by those cheap, rolling barriers which are frequently found in corporate convention centers and university basements. Along one side, there were tables set up for catering, but no food was on them.
This WPRB meeting wasn’t limited to the current staff, but reached across many generations of DJs going all the way back to the 1980s. There were probably around 100 attendees milling about the place.
I was in charge of running the meeting, which of course meant that everyone was coming to me with their problems. Chief among them were technical issues with the wireless headset mics that attendees were supposed to be wearing, and which made everyone look like a 90s telemarketer or the singer of Loverboy. There were dozens of these mics, but only half of them were working. With some effort, I traced the problem back to a piece of equipment that was perched on a table in the back of the room. It resembled a pair of walkie-talkies, half-buried in a hopeless jumble of wires.
As I began untangling the viper’s nest of cables, I became dimly aware of a huge commotion on the other side of the rolling partition walls. DJs at the meeting expressed concern and asked me what was going on, was everything OK, etc., but I just told them to take their seats and chill out because the meeting would begin in five minutes once I got the cables untangled and the microphone problem sorted out.
After a few moments, the lobby commotion had grown into what sounded like a genuine *panic* which I could no longer ignore, so I threw down the walkie talkies and made my way around the partition where I saw hundreds of people all frantically running for the hospital exits.
I went outside and joined the throngs of people who were now massing in the parking lot. There were doctors and nurses, support staff, and patients in hospital gowns who were still lying in rolling beds and hooked up to IVs and echocardiogram machines. I wandered past people babbling frantically into mobile phones, or calling out for friends and loved ones. Pushing through the crowd into a small clearing, I realized that the parking lot looked out upon a gorgeous vista of snow-capped mountains, punctuating a magnificently blue sky in the distance. It looked like a postcard for the French Alps.
As I stood there admiring the natural splendor of the mountain range, there was a sudden series of huge explosions, one right after another from left to right, and giant mushroom clouds began appearing on the horizon. Now the people in the parking lot were screaming and *really* panicking and running all over because the idyllic natural landscape that we’d been stationed at the base of was clearly in the process of being nuked and we were all going die as soon as the shock wave hit us.
I turned around and marched back into the hospital, leaving behind a scene of total carnage in the parking lot. I snuck back around to the side of the partition where the WPRB staff meeting was happening, and stepped up to the podium while gathering my composure and most reassuring demeanor. I observed multiple generations of WPRB DJs who were now all seated quietly and looking at me with expectant gazes. Clearly, the meeting was now about to begin just as I had foretold.
I put on one of the wireless headset mics — all of which were now working perfectly — and said: “Hey everybody, thanks for coming. I’m really sorry but I don’t think the bagels we ordered for today’s meeting are gonna be delivered on time.”