Talky Talk Radio

I do not like talk radio (with the exception of the alt.npr love and radio podcast I follow and listen to on my way to work sometimes... and Car Talk).

I think all of the hate stems from when I was a young and impressionable teenager on the same morning schedule as my mother who used to blast terrible morning radio shows throughout the house. I admit, there was a time when I used to laugh at the phony phone prank calls on my 7 minute drive to work during the summers at 6:52AM, however more than 7 minutes was too much for me and if I had to leave the program mid-joke, I never wondered what the punch line was later. I realize some people like this and I am not judging you by your taste in radio, I just need to state the fact that this particular noise is not music to my ears.

Anyway, I have been having trouble with my alarm clock because I moved one alarm clock into my family room so I would have a clock in there as well as the fact that it doubles as an iPod dock and is quite bright for a bedroom (although I am not the type to mind light in a bedroom while sleeping) and so I moved my other, older, alarm clock into my bedroom for waking up purposes. Turns out the reason I got a new alarm clock was because the old alarm clock tends to be on the fritz. I had forgotten that and overslept and was late to work a couple of times since the switch. Thus, I decided I'd keep my iPod alarm/dock where it was and just start using my phone as my alarm. It is quite handy because although it only lets you hit snooze five times before it shuts off (for a total of 25 minutes of snoozage), you can have a second or even third alarm set to go off again after you know you will have hit the snooze on the previous alarm the max number of times. I have set my phone alarm for three alarms-- two with nice melodic tones and one that is a high pitched beeping sound that alerts me I am in the danger zone and have to get up or just call out sick to work.

The point of the story is, I have been living in this lovely life of three alarms and all is well, when one morning I wake up to MORNING TALK RADIO blasting in my ears. The horror! I jumped out of bed immediately to turn it off and stare at the possessed clock radio. One day it decides to work properly, and all the fiddling I had done previously made it tuned to a radio station that insists on talking to you in the early hours. Horrible. Horrible.

I thought my run ins with that sort of radio genre were over... until today when I discovered that iTunes has a radio feature. How handy, I thought to myself as I perused the many musical offerings including a few from Italy although none that specialized in French Rap. Then, I click on Comedy thinking maybe I could listen to some good stand up. But no.

The first program in the queue was a station entirely devoted to prank phone calls, and in my happy and enthusiastic clicking I had accidentally set it off and even more accidentally turned up the volume. And then my computer froze.

I was forced to listen, cringing and scowling all the while, for a good 5 minutes before I realized I could stop it by turning off my computer (which I did).

While writing this post I am listening to my neighbor have a very personal conversation with what sounds to be her significant other. This makes me think that maybe, just maybe, she can hear my phone alarm go off 11 times in the AM and my 10pm fight with the phoney phone radio station. Maybe this is why no one has said hello to me in the stairwell.