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That Ringing in Your Ears is the Music of Your Mind

We have a horrible new neighbor living above us, and she’s young and preppy and VERY LOUD!  She bangs things on her wood floor/our ceiling all day and all night long.  She walks heavy on her heels back and forth and back again.  She drags her furniture across her wood floor/our ceiling that creates fingernails-on-chalkboard by osmosis.

I have taken to using earplugs when she’s at her most obnoxious and the earplugs do seem to filter out the precise range of her banging on our heads to make her terrorism from above us sort of tolerable.  I’ll leave the whole injustice of, “Why should I have to wear earplugs all day long so I can’t hear you being obnoxious?” question for another day.

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Why is Silence in the Workplace No Longer Golden?

I amazed by the noise levels that are acceptable in the modern workplace.  I’m a self-employed wonk-for-hire — so I spend a lot of time working quietly by myself on my own terms — but sometimes I have to go to a client’s building and try to get work done in the cacophony that has become the public work space.  I have no idea how people get things done in the midst of the cubicle world where people yell into telephones and cellphones and each person has their own radio blaring and conversations take place from one corner of the workspace to the other and it is all done using a voice that curdles milk into whey.

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The Grim Demise of Radio and Records

I grew up on radio.  I worked radio.  I listened to radio.  I was radio.  Our broadcasting Bible was a weekly newspaper called Radio and Records.  Each week, it would arrive at the station and every staff member would take turns reading.  You’d get national news on announcers changing stations.  You read about job opportunities.  You learned which records were getting airplay and why.  I was dismayed to discover all these years later that Radio and Records became an online only publication and, soon after that happened, Radio and Records shuttered itself as it was blended into Billboard.com to disappear — which meant losing all of its identity and uniqueness in the field.

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The Non-Dynamic Duo: Me, Adam West, and Batman at the X103 Car Expo

When I was a wee lad, I had job at a radio station.  I was lucky enough to work on both the AM and FM sides of the dial.  The FM station was known as X103 and we were in the prehistoric rotary dial days before the Age of Digital Radio Tuners.  One night, I was working on the FM side, and a listener called and told me he’d just spent $5,000.00USD on a new home stereo rig and his FM tuner was digital and our station was coming in clearest at 102.7 and not 103.  He asked me why that was, and I told him that the station was actually broadcasting at 102.7, but that the rotary dial methods made 103 close enough for advertising purposes.  The caller grunted and told me to fix it.  A few years later, “X103” was gone, replaced by: “102.7 FM.”

In the early 1980’s, I was told by the radio station I had to work a weekend car expo for X103.  I wasn’t thrilled about it, but I was the low man on the hiring pole and they were going to pay me time and a half, so standing around for six hours handing out X103 car window stickers would at least stick some money in my pocket.  I was also told that Adam West, aka Batman, had been hired and flown in from California to appear with me at the X103 van.  Adam would be dressed in full Batman regalia.  I was surprised that a big star like Adam West would be in Lincoln, Nebraska at a car show standing next to me.

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Broken Families and Half-Brothers and Whole-Sisters

I was born in a time when being a child from a “broken family” meant your mother and father were divorced and you were irretrievably marked in the marketplace of social commerce as damaged goods.  Today, there’s slightly less stigma of being from a broken family — because there are so many more of them now — but that broken label is still hard to shake even if you never let it directly affect you.

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You Are Listening to New York

I love mashups that give you a different perspective on living.  We love Urban Cave Art and now there’s a new treat for your ears called — YouAreListening.to — where you sit and listen to the police sounds of the city set to a random soundtrack.

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Imus Back in Business on Fox

On December 5, 2007, we wrote about Don Imus’ infertile return to broadcast radio.  We were disappointed then, as we still are now, that he was so able to nimbly skirt around his bigoted and racist insults against the females on the Rutgers basketball team. On Monday, Imus started to simulcast his ancient and tired radio show on the Fox Business channel. 

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