NPR: Guest Blogging from the Eye of the Hurricane

Guest Blogging from the Eye of the Hurricane

NPR's Korva Coleman was here at the BPP to observe this morning's show. She sat next to me in the control room and witnessed some fairly impressive technical meltdowns. Now, I don't know Korva well, but the impression I have formed of her is that she's pretty mellow. As a not-mellow person myself, I appreciate that quality about her. But she got increasingly nervous as a weird technical "burp" that happened 15 minutes before show-time kept sabotaging our show in unexpected ways. By the time we got into the second hour, Korva's leg was jumping a mile a minute.

She, of course, blogged about it for us:

It wasn't exactly what I'd call a quiet morning. I was here to "shadow" Rachel, so I can work for her when she's working for Alison who may be working for Luke who may be working for Peter Sagal who may be vacationing in the Pyrenees or some other expensive place and why he would vacation there is beyond me but it's not beyond Peter so I guess that settles that.
Anyway. So Rachel finished her early morning writing and slipped into the studio just before the show started at 7 Eastern, so I went into the control room to squeeze next to Tricia to watch the show. I think it was one of the calmest moments I experienced this morning.

The scare actually began about 15 minutes before airtime when our news word processing program, which is called ENPS, glitched -- we all simultaneously got that irritating hourglass popping up on our screens, effectively freezing all of our work. When we could control our computers again, the processing speed was glacial. Matt Martinez called IT down at NPR in Washington, DC and I knew it would not go well when I overheard him telling the IT support staffer, "yes -- it's spelled E--N--P--S." Makes you want to say "yes, it's spelled N-P-R."

All of the audio you hear on NPR is created through a separate audio program called Dalet -- it's pronounced DAAH-let, even though it was created in France and we probably should say dah-LAY. When Dalet experiences a glitch, it frequently can be a nightmare. Sure, we can call IT back again for help but I always expect someone with a smooth accent to reply, "I understand -- but call us back after the soup course, s'il vous pla??t."

We experienced a dah-LAY glitch.

I could try to explain what happened but it boiled down to this -- either the show's audio was very slow in loading or it disappeared into the universal ether. And that meant we nearly lost our minds in the control room. Audio files that were supposed to be ready for air were nowhere to be found and files that actually did show up on the screen were deceitful. The Petra Haden story was a case in point. I watched all the color drain out of the face of our director, Jacob Ganz, when he realized that just because the computer said we had a Petra Haden music audio file didn't mean that there was actually any music -- or talking -- in the file.

So Tricia celebrated Diwali by growing extra arms like Lakshmi, the Indian goddess of wealth, so she could deal with the crash. It was only when she called chefs Floyd and Barkha Cardoz to talk about Diwali feasting that she made her first mistake -- she'd called them too early and had to hang up on them (she apologized first). Jacob discovered the promo for the next show was missing, the promo that turned up was from yesterday and he couldn't take a chance on ANY audio file because our engineer Manoli kept saying, "It's not there, it's not there, it's NOT THERE." I scrunched up out of the way in the corner.

They're still getting to the bottom of the ENPS/Dalet glitch. But here's the key -- we don't ever want you to know that anything went wrong. And mostly, you probably didn't. Thank god for Alison, Luke and Rachel -- they can vamp better than anyone, which is good, because they were prepared to fill more than two minutes of airtime if the rest of the audio files didn't show up. Thanks to Matt, Jacob and Manoli, it did -- and you got to hear Petra Hayden's lovely a capella group finish singing "Don't Stop Believing".... now THERE's a mantra for our morning.

--Korva

PS: Rachel still had to do a fix though. Ask her how to pronounce the name of the Georgian President: Mikhail Saakashvili.

Tricia McKinney

12:12 PM ET | 11- 9-2007 | permalink

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