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More aged cheese...

2007-03-13

Another oldie from December of '04

 

Good afternoon Boy and Girls!

Jesus reporting here today.

Surrogate and I were talking last night and he was telling me about when he worked at a radio station years ago. Most of what he told me sounded pretty goofy, but I've been thinking about this one story all day.

He wrote comedy for an afternoon DJ most of the time but to supplement his income ended up writing a lot of commercials too. Spots, he called them. From the way he talks about it, you'd have thought he was writing an emmy winning sitcom for years on end instead of 60 second commercials for local pest control companies with big plastic bugs on the tops of their vans. Anyway, he teamed up with another DJ who was more proficient with the recording equipment than surrogate was and together they wrote bunches and bunches of these stupid "spots."

The station was a busy place and because lots of people needed the production studio during business hours, they tended to meet at night when most of the staff had called it a day. Excepting whoever was on the air, a producer or two and a skeleton news staff, the place was usually empty. And, since the broadcast studios were down a long hall from production, they ususally felt like they had their own private recording studio at night causing, says surrogate, a more relaxed atmosphere in which they could work their "creative voodoo" and subsequently, be more productive.

One night surrogate's partner Sam showed up in a foul mood. For an hour, they worked on a project but neither of them were happy with what they'd come up with. Plus Sam snapped a few times at surrogate for things, (once again, this is according to surrogate) that he (Sam) had no business even being upset about.

Finally surrogate snapped back when Sam had "crossed the line" calling surrogate a stupid S.O.B. In the moments that followed the little argument, neither said much except things directly having to do with what they were working on. They muddled through the project, which was supposed to be a funny commercial for a tire chain, and decided not to start on another that evening.

As they started to leave, Sam apologized for being an a**hole.

Surrogate then also apologized and they decided to go have a beer before heading home to their respective families.

surrogate asked Sam why he'd been so testy all night. Sam started to answer, stopped and thought a second and then a grin plastered his face turning soon into uncontroled laughter. He settled dwon and shaking his head said, "They made me smile all day today."

"What?" surrogate asked, having no clue what Sam meant.

"They made me smile all through the mid-day show today. Every time I stopped smiling, this consultant they hired who was sitting in on the show - in the studio with me, would give me give me a big fake grin to remind me to smile every time I spoke."

"Sam." surrogate said, eyebrows furrowed. "It's radio!"

"I know. But this moron said that you can "hear" the smile in someone's voice and that my voice sounded like a frown all the time, so they made me smile from 10:00 to 2:00 every time I said a word on the air. Oh, and he said that faking it wouldn't work. It had to be a "genuine smile"."

"Oh geez" surrogate had seen the consultant running around looking officious for the last day or two.

"So, by the time I got off the air, I was so pissed off I couldn't think straight. I kept seeing this guy grinning this stage grin at me telling me to smile naturally. I can't do it. I WON'T do it. If he comes in tomorrow and starts in on me... I'll walk... or I'm afraid I'll smash his face in."

And that's the part that's stayed with me all day.

How many thousands of times in life are we forced to act in ways we don't feel just to satisfy someone else's idea of who they think we should be? What does it do to us in the long run? Does that sort of thing keep us from actually feeling happy as often as we otherwise might?


I don't have an answer. But I do know that people who seem happy all the time scare me to death.



That doesn't mean we can't... Be Good To Everyone!

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Digital Dreams (2007-03-13)
Happy all the time people scare me too. Nobody is that happy all the time so it makes it seem fake. It might not be fake but it sure seems like it. Afterall, no irritants in a day? That's hard to swallow.

Spirited Minikin (2007-03-13)
Love this one! I fake the whole happy bit quite frequently out of necessity but after it's all said and done I honestly find myself feeling genuinely happier...not always...but more often than most would expect. Of course I do have my days where I want to beat the crap out of people so I guess the power of positive thinking needs a little fine tuning.

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