"Welcome to Holler to the Hood..."

"Hello everyone, and welcome to Holler to the Hood, the show where friends and family call in and send messages to their loved ones incarcerated in central Appalachia. Unfortunately, we're having some technical difficulties in the studio tonight, and we're not going to be able to broadcast any of your calls."

These words will, in future generations, be remembered as the first words Cameron Zohoori ever uttered on live radio. Lovely. Apologies and disappointment.

I went in to Appalshop well ahead of time tonight, paranoid about forgetting something and wanting to leave plenty of time for preparation. Turns out this was a good thing, as I got there and discovered that the radio board in the WMMT On-air room downstairs had been broken. When this happens, they move on-air broadcasting to the upstairs studio. For most shows this is merely an inconvenience; they simply take their music, interviews, etc. upstairs and plug them in. Our show is a bit different. We can't take calls live on the air, because of the risk that we'll accidentally air obscenities from a few callers (few and far between, but something we can't risk - the FCC would be all up on me). So we play music on the air and take calls upstairs, recording them for playback during the last hour of the show. But when the on-air operation has moved upstairs, we can't take calls at all, because the equipment is broadcasting live.

So I'm sitting here for three hours, playing (really good) hip hop music, and answering the phone off the air, telling disappointed mothers, wives, husbands, fathers, children, and friends that they can't talk to their loved ones tonight. My first night, and all I am is a bearer of bad news. Ah well, this is the world of community radio, I suppose. Hopefully we'll have the equipment up and running next week. In the meantime, I'll be sitting here, reading books about being a prison guard, listening to music, and occasionally getting up to do the robot around the radio studio.