These Are the Times That Try Men's Souls

Are you familiar with the anology of the "the duck"?  People dealing gracefully with chaotic or difficult situations are compared to the waterfowl because when you look at a duck gliding across the water it looks like a very calm and peaceful thing.  But under the surface, they are paddling away like crazy.  Well last week, WOSH Radio was a flock of ducks.  It may have sounded like just another five or six days on the air--but behind the scenes it was absolute chaos.

As you might expect, computers dominate what we do.  All of the audio you hear is put into a computer to be edited, processed and prepared for playback.  Well last week, none of our computers that do that worked.  In fact, it was "blue screen of death" time for all of them.  That left me to work in three different studios on four different computers to accomplish what I usually do on one in the Newsroom.

Then on Tuesday, we had an interruption in our cable TV service.  Normally that wouldn't be a big deal for a radio station--except, that is how we bring you Local Five News at Five as part of the WOSH Evening News Hour.  When it became clear that the issue would not be resolved by 5:00 that day, I had to go home and hook up an old stereo to the TV in my basement man cave and connect that to our remote broadcast equipment to get the TV feed back to the studio to put on the air.

And then on Thursday, the construction crew on Oregon Street severed the phone line that provides that service to our offices--meaning we could neither place nor receive calls.  That left us no choice but to do our Morning News Focus interviews and my live reports from the scene of the Oshkosh murder using cellphone speaker phones held up to our studio microphones.

The perfect capper was a weekend that saw one of our "rescue computers" also fail and you can see that last week was truly the worst week ever.  But I'm proud that if I hadn't told you that this morning, you likely would have had no idea--and that is a credit to the folks that I work with here at the Radio Ranch.

Of course, if this week is anything like last week, it may become somebody else's set of problems.