Good audio clip below of the WIYY’s (Rock 98, Baltimore) console melting down during the morning show. These things happen from time to time. I often found, when it happened at one the stations I was working for, nobody would know anything about it. Nope. Just stopped working. What? No, I don’t know anything about the coffee dripping out of the bottom of the console.
Rock 98, (WIYY) Baltimore, coffee spilled into console courtesy of the Baltimore Sun.
If that link doesn’t work, try this one (7MB .mp3 file).
Pictures and stuff at their facebook page.
Off the air for twenty minutes during morning drive. I wonder what kind of console it was? From the pictures on facebook, it looks like Wheatstone stuff. Ouch! That’s going to leave a mark.
I tried to enforce a no eating no drinking in the studio rule. Most of the time I was successful, however, there were various incidents over the years. The worst was the morning show spilling “distilled water” in the console, but not saying anything about it. Months later, the air monitor stopped muting when the main mic was turned on. Nearly caused the guy who did the spilling to loose his hearing. Karma.
At another station, someone spilled soda on all the remote mic on/off/cough switches for the guest positions. That prompted an early morning phone call, which the morning show producer yelled at me and told me I must be at the station in five minutes (I lived about 25 minutes away at the time). Ha! I took my sweet time getting there. The soda cooked all the +5VDC regulators on the guest microphone modules, thus, for the next several days, all the morning show DJ’s had to share one microphone.
Old time radio guys will tell you, do not mess with the engineer.