Radio Tales Under Assembly

A little while ago I posted a plea for radio stories and I got some very good ones! I’m starting to work on an ebook collection of my own experiences in this wacky world of broadcasting and including some of those I’ve been sent.  They range from in-studio shenanigans to off-air tomfoolery to the ever-popular dealings with over-bearing or delusional listeners. I’ll share one of the rarer ones with you today, written and experienced by Mr. Derek Botten. 

There was the time in Guelph when, having consumed far too much coffee and had way too little sleep, we thought we’d have a go at the likable afternoon guy from our AM station.

Our co-worker, let’s call him Larry, had gone on a course or a conference or something that would last a few days, and left his car in the parking lot behind the radio station. If memory serves, it was a late 70’s Dodge Omni. Even by the early 90’s this thing was a beater! It had a manual shift, which didn’t have a lockout, and it had manual door locks which were no match for a bent coat hanger and a steering column lock. This meant that it could be put into neutral and rolled, but the steering wheel was stuck in a slightly right turn position. This made it easy to move, but every 15 feet, you had to drag the front end over so it would stay out of the bushes that lined the driveway, on its way to our clever idea of putting it on the grass lawn up front!

Most regular pranksters would have grinned and slapped themselves on the back, imagining the look on poor Larry’s face, upon his return 3 or 4 days hence. Not us. I have always loved popcorn and, to fellow Orville-oids, what we imagined next may seem like sacrilege. There is no earthly reason for wasting as much of the fruit of the humble cob as we did, to fill the interior of Larry’s Omni. And a couple of Glad bags, representing a few hour’s worth of hot air popping at home, would prove to be just the tip of the iceberg in following this idea to fruition.

I believe it was Mark who suggested that if we installed a layer of plastic from the dashboard, over the seats to the rear window deck, that we’d save ourselves hours of popping. It was an engineering marvel! For a couple of days straight, the radio station smelled like popcorn and the music library became the Orville Redenbacher Boutique.

Noting the stares of passersby on Speedvale Avenue, the crowning touch was to turn it into a radio contest.  Rough calculations of how many kernels were in a bag times the number of bags we figured we’d used gave us an approximate number of kernels that had gone into the creation. We found some local retailers who offered some prizing to the closest guess that was made.

Reports vary as to just how pissed Larry was on the evening of his return. No one was at the station to give him a ride home when the airport shuttle dropped him off that night. He didn’t look any of us in the eye for a while. I think he forgot that we only did it because we liked him. Time has clouded my memory of the exact manner in which that load of popped corn was disposed of. And I hope Larry can smile about it these days! I suppose we should have bought him a shop vac.