The Mess

We are still enjoying our unique new radio station quite a lot, but we are disturbed that the signal is not nearly as powerful as we’d like. Which explains all the contraptions and random wires strung across stacked boxes around the office—watch your head. Oops, look out for the beer bottles there. We removed a long piece of lamp wire from the antenna of the TV, and wound its frayed end around a bit of wire hanger that serves as the antenna for our small transistor radio, which until now has been the radio with the best reception in the entire office, despite being tabled next to our humidor, our furry black shako, and our Apple II in this little lead-lined, roofless echo chamber we call the office.

The TV is a small black and white job that literally receives one station, which is Fox—not the Fox News Channel, thank god—and this is hugely gratifying, since Fox now owns the contract to televise the State High School Hockey Tournament, the sole reason and justification and explanantion for the existence of this television. (We think they still own this contract. We hope they do. Otherwise, we may have to listen to the tourney on AM radio. If this proves to be impossible, our exit strategy will be set in motion—which involves buying a toga and running away to join the Polyphonic Spree.)

So anyway, we ran the other end of that lamp wire into the keyhole on one of our filing cabinets, with the probably mistaken idea that reception is a function of how much ferric metal one can marshall to the cause. If there were any exposed plumbing in the place, we’d wire that into the bargain too, and then we’d consititute a pretty good fire hazard in case of a lightning strike. All this effort has so far resulted in the persistence of very bad reception.

Now some of us have been reduced to streaming our new radio station on our computers, but this aggravates the Big Boss as he meters company bandwidth, and it is also a useful procedure for making the staff insane, because these streams of audio are not synchronized, and unsynchronized streams of the same music are twice as disturbing as having two entirely different stations tuned in. With five or six computers tuned to the stream, it is a little like being stuck in the creepy time-travel sequence of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” without the consolation of Gene WIlder’s bug eyes and the river of molten chocolate, and the Oompah Loompahs paddling doubletime, hell bent for leather.