The Abandoned Station
I rang the buzzer and waited. It was my first day on the job and I showed up about fifteen minutes early cuz that’s what you do, right? I rang it again. Still nothing. On the third buzz, one of the sales execs came out and let me in. She was the only person in the building and gave me a brief tour. The basement that had two abandoned radio studios and a hodgepodge of exercise equipment from the eighties (including an Inversion table and a Shake Weight®). The attic with piles of crap from random promotions past, hand-made signs of contests, boxes filled with branded stuff long past it’s sell-by date, and a huge bookcase with original country LPs from fifty years of music, their covers rotting from water damage and age.
The building was built in the seventies out in a field across from railroad tracks. Brown. Lots of shades of brown and in the fall, it becomes almost camouflaged in the swatch of dead grass and leafless trees. It’s brown on the inside as well. Brown chairs in the lobby. Fake wood paneling. The carpet is beige and is very likely the original carpeting from 1972. Thread bare and marked with the spills of a thousand cups of coffee.
As the stories go, the building once was filled with sixty or seventy employees, all in service of the top five radio stations in Central Kansas but these days there are twenty employees and a host of empty offices and cubicles. The cubicles are like strange archeological digs with the remnants of crap from those who worked at them, moved on, and left a few items behind. A rolodex, unused in years. A calculator from the days before Dell. Pens with ink so old one has to use an ancient branded lighter to heat up the tip only to squeeze enough out to make three letters before going dry again. A plastic troll doll possibly won at the state fair when it was fun and inexpensive.
The work room, where most places keep office supplies, has a dozen cabinets filled with the sort of stuff that hasn’t been used in offices for decades. It’s a mini-museum of how things used to work. Like an apartment you rent because it’s cheap, there are odd dents and holes in the wall in random places. There’s a cork board in one hallway across from the bathrooms. It has a piece of yellowing paper with “KUDOs Board” typed in Comic Sans and a mix of mismatched pushpins. No kudos are ever put up on the board.
Five radio studios, one for each of the stations, are located on the east side of the building. The equipment is at least a decade too old but functions and each has a spot or two of water damage on the ceiling. The rock station has decals, awards, records in cases, all from at least twenty years past. Branded matches complete with branded ashtrays from when smoking was normal. The country stations have next to nothing on the walls but the hallways have framed albums that serve to remind anyone caught there that here once was a powerhouse country music machine.
The resilience of terrestrial radio has always been an anomaly as legacy media continues to lose audience. According to those who research these things, it is due to the local on-air personalities connecting with local audiences that has buoyed its continued resistance to streaming platforms and national syndication.
“Radio is an interactive medium, and part of that is contesting,” Tom Poleman, chief programming officer at iHeartMedia, told CNBC. “For over half of our listeners, contesting is one of the reasons that they come to radio. Over time, contests has become more accessible with digital options like text-to-win and social media contests. Radio is also inherently social: 80% of our listeners say that they come because they trust our host to be the voices of the community.”
The strange crossroads of this place is at the junction of old school management from a Big Deal in Wichita and the slow creep of syndication and consolidation by a corporation hundreds of miles away. Neither wants to spend any money on vehicles, promotional set ups, venues, or building upkeep and so everything degrades.
I remember walking into the Wild Wild West Casino in Las Vegas, having just been hired there, and feeling the same way. Here was a place in decay, a business neglected or strip mined for parts, a corpse just waiting for someone to declare the time of death.
As with most things, I attacked this place as a challenge, trying to find ways to update the promotions, utilize what was there with what could be, figure out what my predecessor left in the wake of her hasty exit. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the vibe was so depressed—was it the emptiness of the building, the fact that it had been purchased by three different corporations in a matter of ten years, or the slow but steady series of layoffs and digital centralization that made terrestrial radio seem irrelevant? Likely, it was all of these things. Most of my co-workers talked about the ‘good ol days’ when these stations were the titans of the airwaves and commanded a certain connection to the larger community.
The Operations Manager, probably the smartest person on staff, laments that it has just slowly gone downhill but far faster since putting the former sales manager in charge who only sees people as a means to squeeze a few more bucks into his bottom line. In hushed tones he one day admits to me that he hates him. My guess is that among the twenty on staff he is not alone in this sentiment.
After three months, the guy in charge decides to hold a meeting to make it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want updating or fresh ideas, he is happy with things the way they are. No changes to existing events, no events that haven’t been done before, no innovation unless it is free of charge but makes money. My sole job was clearly denoted to “keep the train on the tracks” despite the train being busted ass and tracks rickety.
As jobs go, going along to get along isn’t exactly inspiring but it sure is easy. Lots of flexibility with my time, only around three hours of actual work to do per day with the ability to work from home whenever I felt like it. Plenty of time to continue helping my mom with my dad which was why I was in Kansas in the first place. I certainly could’ve managed but this was, as the job itself, an easier row to hoe. I’m grateful for the job but it’s time to move on to someplace less broke-down and depressed.
A creature that has known the over-saturation of a huge city, that has experienced most of its life as a rolling stone seeking out strange artistic adventures among other such creatures, can only be kept in a declining building housing a decomposing business in a tiny town for so long.
