The Day the Station Switched Genres

As with any internship, it's a struggle to learn how everything works without breaking anything in the process. I mean, the station hasn't burned down yet, so I must be doing something right. Still, I'm always afraid history may repeat itself.

That's right, I've already had my share of major radio catastrophes. When I was a summer worker for KALA at St. Ambrose about two years ago, I accidentally switched the station's genre. I was doing some paperwork in a studio I wasn't very familiar with, but my boss had assured me in a different studio that it was next to impossible to accidentally go on air. I figured it was the same way in all the studios. So as I filled out some commercial logs, I turned on some music to listen to.

After I had listened to a few songs, one of the other student workers came running down the hall. He started banging on the studio door like a total nut, so I let him in to see what was wrong, but he just kept yelling, "It's live! It's live!" I couldn't figure out what he meant, so he ran over to the sound board and turned down the music I was playing while turning up what was being broadcast on air.

"What was all that about?" I asked.

"The board was hot. That music you were playing was live," he explained. Indeed, I had unwittingly turned off the smooth jazz that KALA plays and had turned on a little Fall Out Boy instead. Whoops.

My boss at KALA loves to tell this story to new students. We definitely laugh about it now, but it was the biggest flub in radio I've had to date. Now I'm extra careful that I know as much as possible about any particular studio's equipment before I touch anything! Good thing too, otherwise you never know what sorts of crazy stuff you might hear on B100. But hey, that's intern life.

When I told this story to Joni, she laughed and said I'll have a great story to talk about on air when I get big and famous. I don't know about about that, but I can dream, right?