TBT: The Brutal Truth

The Onion -- Fair & Balanced!

When I was about 12 or 13 years old, a Detroit radio station 96.3 WHYT (now called WDVD, I believe) had a jock by the name of Waite. During his shift, he'd have a segment called "Waite's Complaints" where people would call in and air their dirty laundry and get a snark-filled replay from Waite. He would take the best of the lot and edit them seemlessly for a quick 30 second broadcast over the air.

One day back in the mid-80s, my prepubescent naive narrow little teenaged hide had dirty laundry with Mr. Waite and most radio station jocks. I called him up during that segment and the conversation went (and aired) as follows:
 

Waite: Hi, WHYT! What's yer complaint?

Me: Yeah, why don't you DJs come to the phone faster?!?

Waite (incredulous): Why don't we come to the phone faster?

Me: Yeah ...

Waite (chuckling): Because we know there's people like you on the other end--*CLICK*-- Hi, WHYT! You gotta complaint?!?"

 
Now, much older, smarter, and with some minor radio experiance of my own under my own belt, I can empathize with Waite -- the people that call the request line are both a blessing and a curse. A blessing when you get a character that's exactly like a DJ -- loopy as all hell with enough of an arsenal of double-entendres to keep 15 seconds of banter going for the sake of entertaining radio. But a curse when you get a caller that was just like me when I was a teenaged brat -- an obnoxious shitbag. Despite the blessing/curse nature of a radio request line, it's what makes the job fun enough to keep some DJ's around and LIVE in the studio as opposed to ol' voicetracking machine (has to be the listeners -- it sure isn't the pay!)
 
I relate this experiance to you because I feel the same way about building and fixing computers despite the fact that the people I build/fix them for are a blessing and a curse. Sometimes, I get someone that actually knows their shit about computers and other times I get people who claim to know alot about computers when, in reality, they're just reciting whatever bullshit the Best Buy/Geek Squad register barnacles told them for the expressed purposed of annoying the ever loving shit out of me.

Despite it all, I love building and fixing computers for exactly the same reason Waite (and other DJs) love being in radio -- it's because there's people like this fool at the other end of the keyboard; a diabolical dumbshit that actually believed The Onion reported real news as opposed to satire only to turn around and defend himself for being so stupid and gullible in the first place ... and the folks at Blondesense for really, really, making my day! 
 
For the record, no I did NOT build that person's computer and you're just gonna have to trust me on that. Why? On one hand, if I could have 10 people like that idiot call me for either a service call, an upgrade, or a new computer every day for 1-2 years straight, I'd be sitting on a decent nest egg of cash right now because, if they're gonna be suckers for The Onion, they'll be suckers for anything. But having to actually deal with those 10 gullible bastards on a daily basis isn't really worth toying with the temptation of financially raping them blind for the privilege of that nest egg. Conscience is a killer ...
 
Besides, if I had build that dumbfuck's computer, I'd have 600 people on my blog shaking their fists at me so uh ... yeah, I'll gladly take a raincheck on that. It's better to be poor and laugh at them over there ... than to be financially stable and deal with them over here.

posted by Sizemore at 9:48 PM

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