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June 13, 2004
Carl the Ghost
Okay, so if you've already turned in your two-week notice at a job, and you only have four or five days left before you're to the end of those two weeks, normally you'd just finish out those four or five days so that you'd be able to theoretically get a good reference, right? Well, not if you're Tyler, who was one of my co-workers at Marketplace. He up and quit after his shift on Wednesday night, and he didn't even tell anyone. So on Thursday night I was supposed to work 3-11pm with this guy Mike, only because Tyler never showed up, we were there till 1:40am. Needless to say we weren't happy campers. And Scott called me in to cover for Tyler on Friday night, but there was still so much for Derek & I to do that we didn't get out till 1:15am. Aaaargh! And then to top it all off, I had to be at the radio station at 5am on Saturday morning (I was there till 10am), so I only got about three hours of sleep. I was at the radio station again this morning from 5am-9:30am, and I have to be at Marketplace tomorrow morning from 5am-1pm for cleaning duty. KAAAHHHNN! The plus side about all those hours at Marketplace is that I wound up with somewhere around five hours of overtime each of the last two weeks. Boo-ya! But I've really enjoyed my two days off from Marketplace this weekend, I was starting to get a bit burned out.
It's been interesting at the radio station recently though. Back on Tuesday night, the radio station (technically the WJMC-AM transmitter tower right behind the studios on Hwy 48) got struck by lightning. It knocked all the stations off the air temporarily, rattled the windows pretty good, and fried a whole bunch of equipment inside the station, including the EAS machine, a few satellites, and a few pots on both the WJMC AM and FM boards, meaning we've been unable to do some of the things we normally do, or at least not as easily as normal. It might be another whole week before we get the parts in to fix everything, so I might get a few bonus hours there this week, yay!
And then yesterday there was a massive power outage, where basically the entire eastern half of Barron County was out of power for about two and a half hours. I've heard at least a couple different causes for the outage, including the Barron substation experiencing an "electrical anomaly" (heh heh), or that it was the two main transmission lines between Eau Claire and Rice Lake getting cut. But Mike is convinced that the brownout was caused by Carl, the ghost who haunts the radio station. (Carl was a former GM of the radio station back in the 70s, who hung himself in a closet in the basement of the station. There have been many strange occurrences since then that have been attributed to Carl, such as lights randomly turning on and off in the middle of the night, weird noises, or the fluorescent light fixture that randomly fell out of the ceiling and nearly killed me three years ago.) Anyway, Mike and Tricia (another of the part-timers) had been poking around in the basement earlier in the week, and opened the infamous closet, and found a little bit of the rope still hanging or tied there (I don't have any idea why it hadn't all been removed 20+ years ago). So then yesterday afternoon Mike was showing Missy (another of the part-timers) the rope, and Missy said, "I don't believe in those ghost stories anymore." They turned around right after she said that, and at that instant all the lights went out. Mike told me afterwards that he'd never run so fast in his life as when he raced up the stairs as soon as the power went out, hehe.
And I'm just sittin here watching the Pistons-Lakers game on TV. It's a close game in the 4th quarter, but probably about as soon as it's over I'm gonna get to bed. I can't survive much longer on so little sleep.
Posted by Jared at June 13, 2004 10:22 PM