Didja ever have the nightmare after high school or college – dreaming that you’d gotten a call a week before graduation, saying that you were going to have your diploma held up beccause you hadn’t taken Woodshop in seventh grade, or had squeaked through four years without taking Art Appreciation (yep, I had ’em both)?<\/p>\n
I’ve got my own flavor of that nightmare, and it pops up every couple years, including a few nights ago.<\/p>\n
I’m walking into a radio station in some out-of-the-way place.\u00a0 A faceless program director directs me into a control room, to sit at a control panel I’ve never seen before.\u00a0 Without any direction, he says “go to it”, and shuts the door and goes out for a drink.<\/p>\n
A song is playing – usually on some device I’ve never seen before.\u00a0 I have to figure out how to get the next song cued up, get on the air, and hit my break.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The last time I had the dream, it was a little marginal AM station above (I kid you not) Peter’s Grill in Minneapolis.\u00a0 It was just a little placeholder to keep the frequency alive until a new buyer could happen (yes, the backstory was in the dream), so the owner – he looked like “Newman” the mailman from Seinfeld<\/em> – had cobbled together a bunch of equipment from the 1920’s; a big old ship’s chronometer, an eighty-year old control board with Bakelite control knobs and ceramic VU meters.\u00a0 The song (on a turntable) ran out, and I couldn’t find either how to put the other turntable into “cue” to cue up the next record, or how to turn the monitor up so I could hear what was on the air…<\/p>\n …so I spent the entire air shirt winging it until the boss came back and chewed me out before firing me.<\/p>\n The other night?\u00a0 The opposite extreme.\u00a0 I was at KDWB (in its old offices, in Thresher Square, down by the Metrodome) – but its studios were so high tech, I might as well have been on the bridge of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise.\u00a0 The song was playing, and the only way to run the controls was via a table full of touch-screen interfaces whose function I kept messing up.<\/p>\n Not sure what it means.\u00a0 Other than “liberalism sucks”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Didja ever have the nightmare after high school or college – dreaming that you’d gotten a call a week before graduation, saying that you were going to have your diploma held up beccause you hadn’t taken Woodshop in seventh grade, or had squeaked through four years without taking Art Appreciation (yep, I had ’em both)? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16121,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16120\/revisions\/16121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}