How to Answer the Phone

KACA was the station ID of an actual radio station, one at which I worked for a short time. It did not, in fact, “rock like a sum’bitch.” KACA was an easy listening station in Prosser, Washington, a town built around a potato processing plant that would periodically release a burst of flaming gas into the sky Blade Runner style. I never did get a straight answer as to what they did to the potatoes to make them that flammable.

Four days of the week I had the 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. shift. On the fifth day I was 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. I’d sit there, watching the potato-plume while playing Neil Diamond for insomniac farmers. Towards the end of my time there we held the biggest contest in the station’s history. The prize was a one year lease of a Geo Metro. Each day we’d have people call in to get a chance at the car. Recording the calls, a simple matter of pressing a button in any properly equipped station, required unhooking three different pieces of equipment then rewiring them together in a different configuration, taking and recording the call, wrapping it up fast, then wiring everything back together the way it was originally before the block of three songs that were playing ended. If you got anything wrong the microphone wouldn’t work when you tried to announce the next ABBA track.

It was a terrible job. It is also the only job from which I’ve ever been fired. 

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