My Classic Rock A To Z Nightmare

Everybody has had nightmares about their job, correct? Maybe you had a dream about your boss giving you and an unimaginable pile of work to do and no time to get it done, or maybe you just had a dream about getting fired. In radio, they're called “radio nightmares” and everybody that has ever worked in radio has had them. In my 31 years in radio, I've had my fair share of radio nightmares.

Last night I had a radio nightmare about Classic Rock A to Z. Classic Rock A to Z is what we're doing right now on 99.1 The Whale. It's when we play our entire on-air library in alphabetical order. So in my dream I was in the studio playing the songs in alphabetical order and everything was fine. Then suddenly, the lights flashed and the computer rebooted which caused us to have dead air.

Once the computer fired up again, it had downloaded every song ever written. Everything from rock, to classical, to country, every song that was ever recorded was now on the list. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the list in alphabetical order. I was freaking out because I had to search through millions of songs and I could not find the next song.

Meanwhile, with all this going on, my boss came running downstairs to the studio and was screaming at me because we had dead air. Listeners were calling in on the request lines yelling that we had dead air, and I still could not find the next song. Eventually I found a song that started with the same letter as the last song that I played before the computer rebooted, so I threw that on and frantically started searching for the next song.

I remember I was stressing really hard and thought, “just walk away, just quit, and walk out”. And as I turned and started heading for the door of the studio with my boss still screaming at me, that's when I woke up.

Thank God it was only a dream. When I woke up and I opened my eyes and realized that I was still in bed, I let out a huge sigh of relief and fell back asleep.