[BC] Scary listeners

[Mark W. Croom]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <WFIFeng at aol.com>
To: <broadcast at radiolists.net>
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 3:01 PM
Subject: Re: [BC] Scary listeners


> In a message dated 08/30/2006 11:50:57 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> markc at kjly.com writes:
>
>> to be, but when I have worked at Country music stations I just don't
>>  remember that happening as much as I have in Christian radio. It seems
> like
>>  we also get a lot of angry calls from people over hot-button issues that
>>  their pastors or favorite TV preacher have programmed into them and
> someone
>>  on our station presents the "wrong" way. The excoriate us (in the love 
>> of
>>  Jesus, of course) for missing something that is perfectly obvious to 
>> them
>>  (though it's often hogwash when evaluated from an orthodox viewpoint).
>
> In my 19 years at WFIF, we haven't had any quite like that. We're in a 
> very
> nice "bedroom" community, so local crime is all but non-existant. 
> (Thankfully!)
>
> It's usually total crackpots who write undecipherable gibberish on paper,
> claiming "The Lord told them to write this". One in particular used to 
> write us a
> few times a year. He called himself "House of David". Totally whacked.
>
> Sometimes we'll get a wierd voice mail message about something we can't 
> quite
> figure out.
>
> About 17 years ago, we had an anonymous Priest who used to call to object 
> to
> the content on a specific program. We dubbed him "Father X."
>

At Madison we also had some strange mail that purported to be from someone 
calling on Satan to curse our station. Very weird stuff.

Not unlike Father X, we had a guy who used to be fanatical about the music 
we played being appropriate for the liturgical year; for example if we ran a 
song about the resurrection during Lent, he would call and hassle us up one 
side and down the other, threatening us with all kinds of negative 
publicity, complaints to the FCC, etc. He never gave his name, but we'd hear 
from him 2-3 times a year. We took to calling him Mr. Lent. Once I was 
working PM drive the day after Thanksgiving, and played what I considered at 
the time to be the "it's not Christmas music season until I play this song" 
number (Jesus is Born, by Steve Green). We would normally start playing a 
Christmas song each half-hour right after Thanksgiving, and ramp up the 
quantity over the course of the next several days. That first Christmas song 
of the year for me was not over yet, and Mr. Lent was on the phone, verbally 
reaming me a new anal cavity about how I was playing Christmas music and it 
wasn't even Advent yet!

We actually signed up for Caller ID partially because of this guy. One of 
his calls really freaked out the gal who was working the airshift. The next 
time Mr. Lent called after we got the new feature, the boss called him back 
with a "we know who you are and where you live" message and he was never 
heard from again. *whew*  Even though he was whacked, it was still stressful 
dealing with his calls.

Yup, radio does attract its share of *interesting* folks, on both sides of 
the radio, it seems.

Mark
MN