There are occasional perques to working with radio stations — station crap, CDs, movie premieres, and most importantly concert tickets. I saw Barenaked Ladies in Syracuse, Tim McGraw in Pittsburg, I passed on seeing Hootie and the Blowfish in Akron last month (because I didn’t give a Hootie — God, I love that joke), and tonight I came thisclose to making the guest list for the nearby Robert Cray show and they felt so bad about not being able to hook me up that they lined up a VIP ticket for me for tonight’s farther-away Journey/Styx/REO Speedwagon show.

I’m kind of bummed about Robert Cray, since I’ve always wanted to see him. Almost did once, in fact — had tickets to see Cray and Clapton in 1986 and my girlfriend made us late for the opening act. We got there just in time to see Cray take his bow. I was sort of hoping I could complete the circle with the show tonight, but alas it is not to be.

So I’m kind of happy about the Journey/Styx/Speedwagon thing because these are bands from my high school days and I never did get to see Journey. I’ve been following this tour around the country all summer and keep missing it by thismuch, and I just happened to make a casual joke about it tonight and the Promotions Director said “Really? They’re here. The show’s tonight. Let me see what I can do!” So, cool, I’m finally going to catch the Dinosaur Rock show!

Only … not so much. They have a part-timer here who comes in at 5:00 who I have to show how to do a few things in the software before I can leave. It’s going to take me about half an hour to train her (if she’s smart — definitely NOT a given in this case), the show is just over an hour away, it’s 5:55 at this very moment, and she’s not here yet.

Don’t look like no circles gonna be closin’ tonight.

One of the jocks here flagged me down in the hallway awhile ago and asked if I wanted a to-go lunch that had been delivered from a local restaurant. Seems they’d sent over some free lunches in boxes decorated with “Metallica!!!” and “Please stop playing Def Leppard!!!” and there was an extra one for me.

I ate it. It was pretty good. But now… Now I’m wondering if maybe I should have passed. I’m picturing the sandwich-making process, with Beavis and Butthead making a sandwich for their radio idol and … well, improvising as they go along.

Hmm… It didn’t taste funny…

On Monday mornings the day we “go live” on our software, it’s always a nervous drive in to the station for me. I tune them in on the car radio and cross my fingers that A) they’re on the air and B) spots are playing.

Today, both are true. Whew.

Whew, I’ve survived the first week converting the stations here in Manchester, NH. In fact we went “Live” on the new software at 12:05 pm, which is pretty damned good considering that when I did Utica, NY two years ago we didn’t go until something like 3:00 a.m. So now I’ve got the weekend stretching out in front of me: Friday night, Saturday, Sunday… What to do, what to do?

I’m not really the tourist type, so driving over to Salem to check out whatever witchy stuff they have there or going down to Boston to look at the Cheers sign or some kind of sight-seeing stuff like that is right out. I’m kind of at a loss.

There is one obvious option, though: Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun. I did Foxwoods when I was in Providence, RI a few months ago and wanted to hit Mohegan but didn’t get to it. Now I can hear those casinos calling to me … but they’re nearly 3 hours away. Do I really want to spend 6 hours behind the wheel just to play poker?

I don’t know, but I’m enjoying passing the evening here on my hotel room bed considering it between naps.

My company’s network migration woes continue. It’s been back-and-forth for the past two days with assorted executives, IT gurus and know-it-all users mass-mailing conflicting suggestions and fixes to “All,” even as half the company drops off the network and becomes unreachable by email, and everyone in my department is on the road and borderline reachable in the first place. Those who’ve migrated can’t communicate with those who haven’t, vice versa, and everyone’s relying on the broken email chain as the primary avenue of communication.

Me, I haven’t received an email in nearly four hours. Add this to the list of things that make me happy. I’m too busy for this shit right now.

Things that make me happy: Finding a newspaper in my stall in the men’s room.
Things that don’t: Finding the newspaper on the floor.

My company’s computer network is being migrated into the parent network of our parent company. This is causing multiple levels of disruption, but the latest one is cracking my ass up:

From a global email that just came out from one of our IT gurus: The password portion of the migration failed. Everyone?s password in the parent domain is now defaulted to Password1.

Is it just me, or does this create a security breach of epic proportions?

No, wait, I meant to type “Customer Support” as the title of this entry. Oopsie.

What a gang of tools we have over there in Customer Support… I put in a request for them to do something that required me to have several people stop working until the request was completed. When I submitted the request, I specifically requested that they call me to let me know when they were finished. This should have taken maybe 10 minutes.

An hour and a half later I called them back to see what was going on. Well, they’d completed my request in about 10 minutes, but then the guy who did it sent the request back down to the guy who took the call instead of calling ME, and the guy who took the call was (and still is) in a class all afternoon.

End result: me and several other people sitting around with our thumbs up our asses all afternoon because Tool #2 didn’t bother picking up his phone and dialing 4 digits or even just saying “Hey, Chuck, it’s done!” any one of the three times he walked by my cube in the last hour.

Fucking morons.

I just realized I forgot to share the highlight of my trip to Providence, RI a few months ago: the Russian Sub Museum. It was pretty cool touring a former enemy sub, but cooler still was the T-shirt: “Our museum can sink your museum.”

Here’s a picture of me deep in the bowels of the fire-control system.

(As usual, click the thumbnail for full-size fire control.)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Elvis tattoo has left the building!