It was brutal. It was 2001. WXXY just flipped to Spanish AC and I was doing a 6p-Midnight shift. We had Enco Automation for spots and I was told horror stories about the software locking up. Time came for my first stop set and it locked up. I had no clue how to reboot it. It took me like 20 seconds to realize I should just play more music and page engineering. Luckily, all music was still on CDs.

SO many! I was a terrible board opp to start with. My poor boss F. Poff had to deal with my BS over and over. He got me there though, and I eventually figured it out. That’s not the good story though, the good story is someone else’s dead air story where I came out looking like the biggest idiot. Sabrina Saunders was our midday jock and I was the promotions director at the time. I was working in my office playing the station on my office stereo when something went wrong and the station went off the air. I immediately called the hotline. Sabrina, who was not listening to the station at the moment picked up and I said, “Do you know we’re off the air?” She said, “no, are we?” I said “yea, it just happened is Profit still running?”… at this point I’m noticing a strange audio effect in my office “Why do I hear myself in here…” . My voice is not only going through the handset of the phone, but also my stereo speakers. I start to comprehend the situation. The phone lines into the studio are being directed live out to the transmitter, and I’m having a one-sided conversation with the entire Denver Boulder area… Thinking quickly, I whisper (through a 100,000 watt Class C transmitter)… “I’ll be right in.” By the time I ran down the hall to the studio, the station was still very much off the air, but Sabrina was on the floor laughing at me that I just tried to whisper my way out of being heard by 600,000 people listening on the air.

I was playing the 12” of New Order’s “Blue Monday” at KJQ on vinyl. We had two turntables in the studio and more than half of our library at the time was on vinyl. Farnsworth, the station cat, jumped onto the counter and knocked over a stack of carts and sent the tonearm all the way off the record! I was just eighteen and I thought it was a complete disaster! I quickly put the stylus back into the groove somewhere in the middle of the song. After that, I learned to stack my carts on the other side of the room just in case the kitty felt the urge to climb up again.