Imagine if someone was let into your workplace specifically to tell you what a bad job they thought you were doing. They responded to your every move in a negative way and repeated, often using foul language, how unqualified or unfit you were do be in your position. They made blanket statements and assumptions and battered you with their verbal assaults. Imagine also that you had no idea who they were. Their identity was hidden. That’s what it’s like to be a host in talk radio.
You suck! Whoever told you that you should be on the radio should be fired!
Talk radio hosts aren’t the only ones who get this treatment, of course. It happens in all of media, politics and other professions. Everyone who goes online is subjected to the mean responses of Internet trolls. WHat I’m referring to is similar except it arrives to us via text, mixed in with traffic updates, legitimate comments pertaining to the show topic and any other reason a person would contact a radio show. Thankfully the awful ones are in the minority, and our show receives fewer messages from critics than, say, our bombastic afternoon host would get. So we do try to keep it in context. Most days I can laugh them off. But some days I can’t. One afternoon, as I filled in on a different show for the first time, a man texted every time he perceived that I was thinking about what to say. It was like being in an echo chamber or being relentlessly mocked by a heckling parrot.
This show is awful, awful, awful, awful! You two are amateur hour! This is a morning show?
We were chatting about some of the worst ones one day and our Program Director had a lightbulb-over-the-head moment. What if we took a page from Jimmy Kimmel’s mean tweets and put out a video of us reading mean texts? We’d turn the tables on the trolls and have some fun with their negativity. The first video went over well and was shared dozens of times so we’re going to do it again. And again. We’ll even risk the possibility that people have started texting mean things just to get their words into the next video. It has changed the way we look at mean texts forever. Enjoy video number one.
I LOVED this! BTW, Anderson Cooper referred to Charlie Chaplin on Seth Meyers this week. Sooooo…not old. When a co-worker gave me blank stares, I’d remind him/her that it doesn’t make you old to know things, it makes you interesting. It’s called HISTORY. And if we’re lucky, we’ve lived some of it! GREAT bit. Keep owning the haters (most of whom are just too dense to get that they’re the joke, after all). xox