NPR's 'Take Your Child to Work Day' results in accidental radio silence

by Jeremy Mersereau

April 29, 2016

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One button pushed by a mischievous rugrat caused a full minute of dead air.

On April 28th, West Coast NPR listeners were faced with a strange interruption in between all the NYC-laser-focused human interest stories and kombucha cleanse recaps: a full minute and 13 seconds of dead air. Just a reminder in case you’ve (quite understandably) let your old media awareness atrophy: in radio, a full minute of dead air is as unprofessional and amateur hour as, well, this. Still, could anyone even tell the difference between silence and Steve Inskeep?

According to an internal NPR email obtained by Gawker, the cause of the audio drop-off was apparently that great scourge of workplace productivity everywhere: Take Your Child To Work Day.

“One of our junior journalists was somehow able to press the exact sequence, and perfectly timed live insert panel to insert studio 42 into the stream 1,” the email said. “This resulted in studio 42 being inserted into the stream, causing a lengthy impairment.” Sounds like an honest, hilarious mistake, unless the child in question was a sleeper agent for private media interests, which I honestly wouldn’t put past them.

Thankfully, not every NPR station was affected by the outage, leaving only certain West Coast listeners without a precious minute of organic vegetable hagiographies and trademark illicit ideological proclivities. To be fair though, put kids in a giant room full of buttons and knobs 100 times, and 99.5 times something like this will definitely happen.

Can’t wait for the 2020s, when Take Your Child To Work Day goes the way of a healthy middle class, or wages commensurate with inflation, as we’ll all be chained to our bio-organic VR nightmare cubes 24/7. Nothing must stop the march of production! But until that glorious day, blunders like these are just the price we have to pay.

[h/t Gawker]

Tags: Music, News, dead air, kids, npr, oops, radio

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