It started off all right. I spent the day putting together that evening's Self Help Radio, I had a delicious dinner with the wife, I fed the cats, I took the time to do a little Twitter research, & when midnight rolled around, I tuned in to KBOO on my radio to listen to when I would be on the air.
You see, I have been doing Self Help Radio - & basically all the shows I've done on KBOO - live from my little room since last summer. There have been occasional glitches, & I'm aware they can happen. But there hadn't been one in several months. I suppose you could say I was complacent.
The system in place at KBOO works quite well. I basically stream my show from my home to KBOO, & if the stream is interrupt, it plays a song or a station spot & gives me the chance to reconnect. This is partially because something as dumb as accidentally downloading a file can disrupt the stream. We can't watch Netflix or anything like that, & we sure as hell shouldn't be trying to upload or download anything, while we're doing the live show. Which is fine - it's midnight for fuck's sake, the wife's asleep, it's just me & some caffeine & my dumb radio thing.
But something awful happened Tuesday morning. The show started after the KBOO spots played. I was able to get SHR going & was even in the middle of my first airbreak when my internet just stopped. This was around 12:15am. It wasn't a glitch, it wasn't something I did, it wasn't a power surge or anything like that. It stopped & it didn't come back on. For thirty minutes.
The worst thing was, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I just listened to the radio as the automation system compensated by playing a song & a spot, tried to connect, played another song & another spot, tried to connect a second time, played a further song & spot, tried to connect a third time, played a desperate last song & spot, & then played an old episode of Self Help Radio from November of last year. I texted a couple of people from KBOO to see if they were up & could help, but they weren't up - & by the time my internet came back on I was so demoralized I didn't think I could do the show. I had a beer, I read a book, I felt like shit.
You probably can't tell, but I put a lot of work into these dumb radio shows I do. Their shabbiness is my amateurishness, & if it were just me, I wouldn't feel so bad. But I ask people to help out. & when I can't do the show, it makes me feel I've let them down.
This turned into some massive self-pity for me but I actually wanted to say two things. One, going forward, I don't think I'm going to do Self Help Radio - or any radio show - live from home. I've never seen myself as oversensitive but I don't want to live through something like this again. Anyway, the Dickenbock Report is recorded & it doesn't seem to suffer for it.
Which brings me to number two: if you want a dose of Gary radio this week, you can go to the Self Help Radio website & listen to this week's the Dickenbock Report. I archive all those shows, actually, I just don't make a big deal about this. This week I focused on Utah. Why? Go listen! It's at the top of the page.
& next week's Self Help Radio will be what this week's Self Help Radio was supposed to be, only my airbreaks will be recorded tomorrow or Saturday. I am still really bummed about it. The chance of it happening again is pretty great, so I'm going to just nip it in the bud & not give that chance a chance.
Sigh.
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