Cough cough bark hack

It appears I’ve finally caught the bug T and M have had all week, and that M’s still struggling with—she’s coughing up thick mucus and draining more from her nose.  I haven’t yet convinced the pediatrician this needs something more than Amoxil to treat the one ear she has infected.

In me, the whatever-it-is has turned into my annual case of bronchitis, which is no surprise—it’s about time.  It feels like a flu-type virus set this off, since I ache all over and have a low-grade fever.  My lungs are a concerto of rales and rhonchi, and each barking cough strains my throat.

Yesterday we were absolutely slammed at the local NPR station (KUT)’s pledge drive.  (I’ve worked their pledge drives as a volunteer since their very first one in 1975, and in that time have missed only one.  I half-jokingly refer to myself—but only half-jokingly—as “the oldest living volunteer.”)

I was captain on the pledge phone bank for the most popular show on the station, a free-form music/interview program that runs every week morning.  Because yesterday was the last weekday in the drive, we had everyone calling to pledge who’d been putting it off all week, hurrying “to pledge for Eklektikos.”  We had fifteen phones staffed, and still couldn’t keep up with the call volume—some were spilling over to the overflow call center; still other people were pledging over the station’s Web site.

I was checking the forms coming from the phone volunteers, adding up as fast as I could, and handing the forms off to two people who were writing them down to be run to the studio and announced—and they couldn’t keep up.  We finally began doing triage, only running in names of the higher-dollar pledges ($365 Dollar-a-Day, $500 business memberships, $1000 Leadership membership) and ones that had intriguing listener comments or challenges.  I worked so hard and so fast that when the lunches arranged for the volunteer staff arrived, I didn’t have time to get up and fetch one for myself, and by the time I could take a minute, they were all eaten.  That failed to please me, because by that time I was very hungry and tired as well, and could really have used to eat lunch.

We finally closed out the show at one in the afternoon, and I pulled a grand total—476 pledge calls totaling $43,500 in four hours’ time!  I learned this morning that after we added in the call-center and Web pledges, the total ran up around $52,000, which nobody has ever done, in the entire history of the station!  It just barely beat out Morning Edition, which raised $51,000 in three hours.  About ten minutes after the show ended, John Aielli, the show’s host, walked into the pledge room to ‘count the bodies,’ and the entire group of volunteers gave him an ovation.

Today I was back to captain the phone volunteers for Weekend Edition Saturday from six to nine, then switched over to answering phones myself for Folkways, the weekly six-hour folk music program (none of the hosts try to define “folk music,” but they know what it is).  This week’s host, Ed Miller, had decided to go for more than the $24,000 goal set for him before the drive started, and he beat the bushes for all he could find, which turned out to be a goodish bit.  So good, in fact, that at 12:15 PM, the station manager decided that if Ed could make his goal by 1:00 (theoretically the show was to run until three), we’d quit the fundraising early and go back to normal programming.  It was dicey, but with the help of the Web pledges we made it, and listeners got two unexpected hours of normal Folkways listening.

The entire drive was astonishing.  Before it began, station management decided to cut the drive’s length from eleven days to eight and a half, yet still try to raise the $500,000 previous drives had brought in.  And to the astonishment of just about everyone, it happened, and more.  The preliminary total for the drive, announced this afternoon, was an unprecedented $640,457 in pledges, twenty-three percent more than the goal, and accomplished in twenty-five percent less time!  Based on that performance, they’re considering an experiment with shortening the spring pledge drive even further.  And to make it even better, KUHF, the NPR affiliate in Houston, which has a target audience of three million in the Metro Houston area (Metro Austin has 1.2 million listeners) just wrapped up its pledge drive, during which their air staff harangued their listeners to “pledge because we want to show we can raise more money than Austin does.”  Their final total was only $625,312.  Sorry, Charlie . . . .  There’s a reason KUT came in as the #1 station in the latest Arbitron ratings for Austin—they’re that good, their listeners know it, and they dig into their pocketbooks to make sure things continue that way.

Lucinda Williams orates a blue intestine.  Fnord.