10:00 pm. I’m still at the station and I’m now completely alone. Everyone else has gone home, leaving me, the stranger from out of town, alone in a building stuffed with millions of dollars worth of electronics, not to mention four radio studios to choose from in which I could barricade myself and begin broadcasting my insane manifesto.

But no, instead I’m just sitting here, surfing the web. And considering rifling through some drawers. I wouldn’t do that, but it’s fun to consider.

Why am I still here? We finally got into the locked account, booted up the overnight machine, and managed to get two logs to autoload. Unfortunately, we still have two more logs to load. The traffic manager who was working them at 6:00 abruptly stopped halfway through, announcing that he had to go bike riding and that he’d be back at 10 (or was it 10:30?) to finish.

So here I sit, hungry, tired and cranky, waiting for this lollygagging nipplehead to finish what should have only taken 15 minutes to do in the first place. Knowing him, though, it’s going to take him an hour to do it once he finally gets here, and he’ll be complaining the whole way and bitching about how much better his beloved old system would have done this.

I may actually give his old system a test drive if he starts up with that noise. The PC and monitor it ran on are still here, sitting on the floor next to his desk. I bet they’ll crush his skull nicely, much better than our system would.

He’ll die happy.

I was tempted to title this entry M is for Motherfucking Fairbanks but this is a family website and I wanted to keep it clean for the kiddies.

So, yeah, fucking Fairbanks. It’s 7:35 pm local time and I’m still at the office. I’m the only person still at the office because all the local staff went home already, leaving me with a steaming pile of shit in my lap and leaving me to my own devices to fix it. Because, you know, I’m The Conversion Guy, so I must know how their shit works around here. But I don’t.

One of the computers here wouldn’t autoload tomorrow’s traffic logs like it’s supposed to so I called tech support (not my company’s support because it wasn’t our software locking up). He hemmed and hawed for awhile and finally proclaimed that everything was set up right and should be working. I brought him back to earth by pointing out that, in fact, it wasn’t, which was why I called him in the first fucking place. Moron. So he suggests that, hey, rebooting it will probably work. So I did.

Big fucking mistake.

What happens when you reboot a computer? It restarts, and then you have to log in to it. What happens if you don’t have the login information? You’re stuck. Guess who’s stuck.

But, hey Chuck, call the station’s IT guy, he can help you! He knows you’re doing a major software conversion to his station’s computers and that things are likely to go wrong, so he’s probably hanging by the phone, waiting eagerly for your call.

Wrong. Stupid is not waiting for my call. Stupid is on vacation somewhere in the Alaskan outback. Nobody knows where he is, nobody expects to hear from him for another 8 days, and he isn’t answering his satellite phone. Because, you know, he’s on vacation. During a major software conversion that’s been progressing for 3 months.

Fuck it, I don’t care. If you can’t be bothered to keep your own shit straight, then neither can I.

I’m getting laid off in three months and my company can’t afford to lose me, and even if they decide they really can afford to lose me all that means is that I’m out of a job 90 days early. Fuck it.

F isn’t for Fairbanks. It’s for Fuck You, Fairbanks.

A big part of my job is managing people. Not in terms of being their manager, but in terms of being their baby-sitter. I have to hold hands and reassure and wipe noses and generally ease the transition to a new way of doing business.

I’m surprisingly good at it, considering what a misanthrope I am and how much People annoy me. When I’m on the clock and thus motivated to help, I can be amazingly patient with someone I would normally drop-kick across the street just for the sheer entertainment of watching them bounce. I am as amazed as anyone at what a calming and reassuring influence I can be with people who are wigging out about a new way of doing things. I somehow tap into a previously-unknown reserve of extraordinary patience and sympathy and reassuringly soothing tone, and somehow I make it all “okay.”

But.

Here in Fairbanks, I may have met my match. This guy up here is the biggest friggin’ crybaby I’ve ever seen. He complains. And bitches. And complains. And bitches some more. And no matter what I show him, no matter what needs to be done, no matter what topic we’re discussing, he somehow manages to bring it back to the software he won’t be using anymore. He has an almost erotic attachment to it, and I’m getting pretty damned tired of hearing how great the old software was when he’s not going to be using anymore. Bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch.

It’s said that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I have found that I have more tools at my disposal than I thought and I can somehow finesse these situations. But this guy… This guy…

Where’s my fucking hammer?

I fucking hate fucking Fairbanks fucking right fucking now.

Friday — today — is the make-or-break day in the software conversions I do when I travel to all these different radio stations. It’s the culmination of a 13-week run-up, the moment when months of work by dozens of people coalesces to produce the new traffic log out of our software. It’s when you find out that (hopefully) everything has been done right and the system works.

It ain’t working here.

I’m finding out now, in the 12th hour, that there are things they didn’t understand that they never asked me about, that there are assumptions they made that are just flat wrong that led them to make mistakes, and that all the checking I’ve done all along that “This is X, right?” and their answers that “Oh yeah, X is X, it’s always been X” has just been wasted breath because they don’t even know what the fuck X is.

13 weeks of work all comes to a head now, today, and I need to get it all straightened out in the next few hours. I’ll get it done, but it’s not going to be pretty.

I quit drinking 17 years ago and smoking 4 years ago. Today, I need a drink and a smoke.

Groan. I’m back in the office after two weeks on vacation. I’m sorry, but between this and the Caribbean, there’s just no comparison. Sigh…

As requested, here is my nutshell review of Dawn of the Dead: Two decomposing but still animated thumbs up!

Strong points:

• Sarah Polley
• Ving Rhames
• Lots of energetic and hungry dead people

Weak points:

That’s right: no weak points. This movie hit the ground running and never looked back. Plot holes you could drive a truck through are blissfully ignored, bad acting straight out of a West Valley acting class is spot-on, there’s dialogue more stilted than a 10-foot clown in a parade … and it all worked beautifully. This was an excellent remake, preserving the tone of the original while updating it to the present.

I loved every minute of it. And I got away with it, too.

Sweet.

I have a dirty little secret I’m going to reveal here, and I hope like hell my boss (or any potential snitches) doesn’t read this blog: I sometimes have popcorn for lunch. And I eat it in the movie theater across the street from the office.

It’s a matter of careful timing and balance and faith in the scatter-brainedness of my supervisor and her supervisor, but so far it’s working pretty well for me. It has to be a short movie — Lord of the Rings just won’t do. It has to start around 11:30 — I can scoot out a little bit early and it’ll get me back a little later than if I had taken a “normal” lunch. And it has to be something I want to see — Twisted just won’t fly (and no Ashley Judd movie ever will). So far, so good.

And today, all the planets are in alignment for me. Boss: out sick. Boss’ boss: day off. And opening today: Dawn of the Dead.

Oh yeah.

Sigh… I’m almost finished reading the email from the last entry.

Radio as an industry attracts “interesting” people, and I have the “pleasure” of working with them. The station personnel I work with are usually normal people, but every once in awhile you’ll run into a real wingnut. I’ve found King Wingnut.

Yesterday, I assisted in a training conference call for a radio market I’ll be converting in a few months. I was there just to answer questions the trainer couldn’t handle (because this particular trainer can’t handle ANY), and I closed the call by inviting them to “Call or email me if you have any questions.”

King Wingnut took it to heart. This is the email he sent me that afternoon:

Chuck —

I have more than 30 years experience doing radio traffic, and have gone through many traffic system conversions in that time. I must say that I am more confident about the (Your Software) change than I have been with any other. It is very apparent to me that the sweeping changes we are going through are being driven from the top down by people who understand the broadcasting business, and have a clear vision not only of where they want to take Corporate Overlord, but exactly now they are going to get there. And best of all, they have the drive and the talent to make sure it happens.

For our usage, it was the best traffic system I ever saw — better than YYY, better than ZZZ, better than (Your Software’s competitor), better than (Your Software). Imagine how lean and clean (Your Software) could be if it only had to work on one single radio station in the whole world, with only one kind of break structure, one kind of programming, one kind of automation system, etc. Our system was so tight and integrated to our requirements that it would have been completely useless in any other environment than ours. There was no flexibility of any kind built into it because we didn’t need any flexibility.

It was a hard changeover when Company RevA (which subsequently became Company RevB and then Company RevC and then Corporate Overlord) bought the station I was at (I was actually one of 6 partners that owned the station) and I had to go to (Your Software’s competitor) traffic software. It was different from what I was used to, so it couldn’t possibly be any good. :-) Over the years I came to appreciate what it could do and its flexibility was impressive. Then, when (Your Software’s competitor) upgraded to their next version, I became a true believer. The cart rotation system was (and still is) so much better than the system that I co-authored. I would never have thought of the concept of the two-tiered rotation system (plan level, and within the plan level, the cart level) much less been able to block out the coding for it. Without exaggeration, I can challenge you to come up with a cart rotation scheme that it cannot handle easily and gracefully, and predict that you cannot. If you wanted 5 carts in a percentage rotation, with two of the carts to run 50% each on Thursdays only but with a 5pm cutoff, and all carts to rotate by percentage in all other days/times — it would be trivial to do so.

I became enough of a power user in (Your Software’s competitor) that they put me on their beta test team, and they told me that I found more bugs and made more suggestions that subsequently found their way into release software than all the rest of the alpha testers combined. I am the only person in the history of (Your Software’s competitor) to ever defeat their “magical shift-F9 code”. (Your Software’s competitor) has hidden menus that are to be accessed only under the tutelage of their tech support. Menus that if used injudiciously could damage or destroy your data files. These menus are used to clear error flags and restore indexes, or maybe “unpost” traffic data that was erroneously sent to A/R. To access these menus, you call (Your Software’s competitor) tech support, they direct you to the appropriate menu where you have to key in “Shift-F9” which generates a query number. You tell (Your Software’s competitor) the number, they give you a reply number to key in, and that unlocks the hidden menu. I kept track of the queries and replies for a couple of years (yes, years!) and reverse-engineered the algorithm they were using to generate the counter numbers. (Actually, it turned out my algorithm was easier to use than theirs, and a lot of their techies are using my method now instead of the “official” one which requires use of a calculator. Mine does not.) It caused a small panic at (Your Software’s competitor) the first time I ran Shift-F9 to get my query number, and came up with the reply faster than the tech support guy could give it to me.

I abandoned my beta tester status with (Your Software’s competitor) when they brought out Version IV, which had a “true GUI interface”. I refused to upgrade my system to that software version, because it would have required me to spend about 25% more time doing traffic than with the old system. It was a true GUI interface only on the very surface. (Your Software’s competitor), as you probably know, is an entirely menu-driven system. The only time a mouse is used is to click on the desktop icon to start the program. After that, it’s all keyboard. ” Eeeewwww! Old DOS-style technology.” It just happens to be hugely more time-efficient than click and drag for most operations that are required in traffic. When (Your Software’s competitor) added their GUI interface, the only thing they did was to make each menu item selectable by clicking with a mouse, but they also kept the old system of being able to type the menu item number. Which do you think is easier? Typing in the number “3”, or taking your hand off the keyboard, finding the mouse, dragging the mouse cursor over so it is on top of the “3”, clicking the mouse, then returning your hand to the keyboard? I could have lived with that — except that in a blatant example of pandering to Sales ((Your Software’s competitor)‘s sales department, that is) they made the “Master Menu” (the one you have to go through in order to change from one station to another, or from Traffic to A/R, or Payables or whatever) all pretty and full of clickable mouse icons and no keyboard shortcuts to get through it. “Look at us,” they said. “Now we’re a real Windows program just like Microsoft Word or Excel. See the pretty icons?” Station managers loved it — because they didn’t actually have to use the software. (Your Software’s competitor) salesmen loved it because they could sell it to clueless station managers. For me, it was disastrous. Here’s why…

I do traffic for four stations, usually 100% sold out stations. (More about that later) In (Your Software’s competitor) (but, apparently, not (Your Software)) each station’s software, data files, configuration, etc. is separate from the others. Basically, I have four standalone systems, loosely connected through the Master Menu. This means when I have an order that runs across more than one station, I enter it into the first station, then copy that order to the (Your Software’s competitor) clipboard (not to be confused with the general Windows clipboard) then go through the Master Menu to the next station, and then paste that order from the (Your Software’s competitor) clipboard and make whatever changes are required to accommodate the new station, usually just the spot rate. It sounds cumbersome, but I can copy an order, paste it to two other stations and adjust the rate for each of those stations in about one quarter the time that it took you to read this paragraph.

How can I do that? Because I use a programmable keyboard. Once I have an order entered in one station, I type the letter “C” to copy it to the clipboard, then hit one of my programmed keys which closes out the order, takes me down to the Master Menu, goes to the station where I want to copy the order, where I key in “+” (to signify new order) and “P” to paste the order from the clipboard. So I’ve closed out one station, opened the next station, pasted the order into the new station, all with a total of 4 keystrokes. You couldn’t even get your hand off your keyboard and onto your mouse in the time it takes me to do that. All is well and good — until my keyboard macro program self destructs when it can’t get through Version IV’s Master Menu because it requires a mouse to do so. That’s why I am still using Version III, and my biggest concern about (Your Software) is that I am going to run into the same sort of problem!

If I understood today’s teaching conference correctly, you personally are going to be coming here for our conversion. Is that correct? I am really looking forward to that — getting to talk to someone who in the short run knows more about a traffic system than I do. Give me a few months to use (Your Software) and I will be your “star” pupil! I think I can show you a few interesting things about traffic in general, and show you some (Your Software’s competitor) ideas that you aren’t familiar with that are well worth plagiarizing. For instance, let me tell you how I deal with sold-out radio stations. Actually, it is kind of pointless for me to describe this, because the spot placement paradigm that (Your Software) uses (booking agent runs all the time, logs assembled 15 months in advance, unplaced spot pool) is completely non-conducive to my (Your Software’s competitor) method. But I’m going to tell you anyway, so you’ll be impressed with how smart I am. :-)

Using this method, we “pre-qualify” our logs a week before we assemble them. We always know exactly the state of our inventory, where we’re over-sold and where we’re undersold. Pretty much what the (Your Software) booking agent does, but with more personalized control. I’m not comfortable with what I perceive as (Your Software)‘s rather cavalier attitude towards BTA spots. 60-70% of our total spot load is what you would call BTA, what I would call TAP, and to me TAP comes with an obligation to give reasonable vertical rotation. Just because an order allows spot placement from 6am-Midnight doesn’t mean that we should run 80% of their spots after 7pm. Oh, that’s great in the short run — you move those supposedly pre-emptible spots out of the way and stick higher-priced dayparted spots in their place. But in the long run, those TAP clients who got screwed are going to go spend their money someplace else, and those TAP clients represent over 50% of our revenue. To me, a schedule that crosses multiple dayparts carries within it an implicit contractual obligation to give more or less even distribution across those dayparts. Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but my impression of (Your Software) is such that I’m surprised that they don’t just use the rate per spot as the sole prioritizing agent and the hell with any long-term concerns about repeat business.

All that said (and congratulations for making it this far through this email!) I am greatly reassured that, aside from the booking agent/pool idea, (Your Software) seems to be very similar conceptually to (Your Software’s competitor). I do not foresee any great difficulties in making the transition.

ps: Do you remember “(Early version of your software)“? That was the precursor to (Your Software). I was one of a group of about 10 traffic managers from all over the country that Company RevC sent down to San Diego about five (?) years ago to act as a “test group” to train their installers. (Early version of your software) was a disaster, and I was the terror of the test group in pointing it out to them. Nonetheless, (Your Software)is built on the bones of (Early version of your software). I just hope that they have greatly improved it since then.

Oh. My. God.

I’m not looking forward to working with this guy for next two months. At all.

Many of the techs on The Company’s Help Desk haven’t really been socialized very well. Their people skills on the phone are so atrocious that I sometimes joke that we must keep them in a cave at night and only let them out when the phones ring. After reading the following email one of them sent out — a company-wide email — I think the cave crack might have been too generous:

I seem to have made way too much lemonade for our lunch……

Bob

How’s that for a tempting offer? In a word: Yuck. Also: Ew.