Drop Anchor!
From Ric Gonzalez [Ric.Gonzalez[at]coxmg.com], Cox Media Group, San Antonio, Texas
Alright… first one that comes to mind is the female paramedics who pulled up in their ambulance during my overnight show many crazy years ago. But I can’t have that one printed. So… instead, there was the time someone at our station had the great idea to take the station BoomBox (remember those?) and put it on a huge float/barge and tow it out to the middle of Town Lake in Austin. We (station) were going to bring Santa (hidden in our Boom Box) to the masses. These BoomBoxes were huge radios you could do live broadcasts from. They looked like a concession stand bookended with giant speakers. Plan was to announce Santa’s arrival, and a little boat and an official would take him to Auditorium shores where all the children would be waiting to see him.
Our barge with the BoomBox, me, the PD, and three other jocks got towed out to the middle of Town Lake. When we arrived at the spot, the guy in the tow boat told us to drop anchor. I was on top of the BoomBox and doing my best Pirate-Captain-dude. I yelled down to one of the jocks (who I won’t mention), “Ahoy there mate! Drop anchor!” And NICK dropped the anchor.
After some live broadcast to build it up, a boat came and got Santa and took him to the shore. The PD decided to go with Santa. He’d had enough of floating on Town Lake.
It started getting colder as the sun went down soon afterwards. Then it flat out got ugly cold and dark. We finally figured out that they forgot to tow us back. That’s a little after we also figured out that we’re moving! Turns out the rope was still neatly coiled up on the corner of the barge. I looked at NICK and said, “I thought I told you to drop anchor?” He said, “You never told me to tie the rope to it.”
There we were. In the dark, freezing our behinds off… and we figured… drifting towards the dam. This was long ago before everyone and their kids had personal cell phones. Plus the battery in that huge brick-of-a-phone that we had from promotions for coordinating the call-ins had died earlier.
We did try to guess who the strongest swimmer was, but decided it didn’t matter since we couldn’t see ANYTHING and the water was probably very cold.
Meanwhile, back at the bar where I was supposed to meet our promotions director, engineer, and others, they realized I was later than normal. The promotions director (now my wife) and the engineer then realized that each thought the other had taken care of arranging to have us towed back.
They sent a boat to search for us. All I had on was a black nylon station jacket, sunglasses, white t-shirt, and blue jeans. It was really cold!
