Maloney mixup

​There’s not a lot you can say after a full day of radio stuff and then you gotta cook your own dinner. Alexis has another function this Thursday evening, so here I am finishing up some chicken and corn on the cob with a little fried zucchini covered with parmesan cheese. It might just sound good to the three or four of you, especially if it’s around dinnertime, but believe me, I’m at best a poor cook. Everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – tastes better when my wife cooks it.
 
5:30am – Started my radio show. I don’t really remember what I talked about for the first 90 minutes. Do you?

7am – Patrick Maloney, the new president and CEO of Franciscan Health in Munster, Dyer and Hammond, came in. He’s from Philadelphia, so he talks with his hands. And man can he talk, especially when you consider that he’s in a profession that tends to attract the dry and stuffy. Maloney is not that.
 
As a matter of fact, I actually got Patrick Maloney confused with another Maloney – on my phone.
 
I got a text yesterday from a guy named “Maloney.” It said:
 
“I’m scheduled to go on your show tomorrow at 7am. What time should I be there?”
 
Now I’ve recently upgraded to a new iphone 7. On this new phone, when a text shows up, it only shows the last name. So I thought that producer Ryan had somehow scheduled a guy named Matt Maloney, who traded at the Board of Trade  while I was there. Matt Maloney now lives in Munster and is president of the Booster Club.
 
Now when I see Matt Maloney at a game or at a dinner or the baseball field or wherever, both of us immediately revert to type. We swear and make incredibly rude comments about each other. And that’s before we start reminiscing about the old days standing on the floor of the Board of Trade. It was a wild place, and I guess you could say that we were both wild people.
 
We’re not now. Actually, we’ve both turned into aging, boring guys with potbellies and receding hairlines. That doesn’t stop us, however, from interacting in a crude manner. So when I saw that text and I thought it was Matt Maloney, I immediately typed in a crude response in very inappropriate language.
 
Right before I hit “send,” however, I glanced at Maloney’s number and realized that it was from a different area code. A little more detective work and I figured out that it was the new CEO of Franciscan and not one of my loser trader compatriots.
 
I didn’t send the text. Patrick Maloney came on the show today and took several excellent phone calls, including one from a woman named Lori who said she almost died from sepsis.
 
Now I don’t know about the three or four of you, but I don’t even know what sepsis is. But Patrick Maloney did, and he assured Lori – who was calling for better education of nurses and hospital personnel about the condition – that the hospital network was on it. They’ve reduced the amount of cases by a huge percentage. All of this discussion went over my head.
 
8am – North Township Trustee Frank Mrvan III did not show up for his show. I was a little pissed.
 
8:11am – North Township Trustee did show up for his show, but he opined that since he was late that he and I should just go to breakfast before a NIISSA meeting that we were both scheduled to attend.
 
8:20am – Frank and I sit in a booth at The Wheel down the street from WJOB. I get a phone call and have to take it. Then Frank gets a phone call and has to take it… and then leave abruptly. We don’t get to talk about anything.
 
Lake County commissioner Mike Repay does walk by the table and he knocks on the table to get my attention. That’s a start, I suppose. Mike and I aren’t on what you would call speaking terms of late. That’s how it goes when you’re in local radio. Sometimes elected officials can take a joke, and sometimes they can’t. Mike’s scheduled to come on with me next week after a couple year hiatus. Let’s see how that goes.
 
9am – NIISSA meeting. I’m somehow part of this group trying to build what’s known as a multi-agency coordination center. It’s where you’ll go in a disaster or for the area crime lab or for training in hazardous material and so forth. I talk with Greg Mance, the police chief of Griffith, and Dave Coulson, who’s with the ATF. Ryan Holmes out of the federal prosecutor’s office and I laugh about a name I have given one of the office’s lead prosecutors. I call him “Bulldog Benson” because he storms around the courtroom like a bulldog when he’s in the process of putting politicians in jail. I’m not kidding. I can’t remember his real first name. I think it’s Phil, but I like Bulldog better.
 
Noon – I pick up Qdoba Mexican food for Christina Cortez and I. We’re set to meet at the old WJOB station to fix a bunch of stuff for the next five hours . We were able to:

1. update our Simian broadcast playout system
2. run three 100-foot Cat 5 cables to various computers
3. install a Barix encoding system so I can broadcast from my house (it’s not finished yet, or I’d go down into my den and start talking on the air right now. I can’t freaking wait for this to be available. I’ve waited 13 years to be able to go into my den and be on the radio in a few seconds.)
4. reconnect our new studios at Purdue with our transmitter site behind Smith Chevrolet seven blocks away. For you radio buffs, we connect the audio of the two studios using a Tieline encoder. This really doesn’t mean much to the average person, other than we recently found an error in the way we did it. You see, we added an FM station a few months ago… and we forgot to change the way we send audio from one point to the other from mono to stereo. Really. For seven months or so, we’ve been broadcasting in what’s called bi-aural mono instead of stereo on the FM. Sounds way better now that we fixed it.
5. install a mixing board to raise the volume of the sound on the FM signal. This is a tricky one. We have a processor to manipulate the sound – and the quality of the sound is solid - but for some reason our 104.7 FM is a just a little lower in volume than surrounding FM stations. Just a little. Can’t figure it out.

 
That’s a lot of radio minutiae for tonight. But then again, this blog for the three or four of you is called “My Radio Life.” And like it or not, this radio life contains a lotta  little bullshit things to do. Another Thousand Words. See ya.