As in: Flotsam , Media

As I've mentioned before, I'm hooked on The Current, which I listen to over the internet. It's a Minnesota Public Radio operation that plays a very wide range of music from a variety of genres and eras. I knew it would be the right station for me during my first listening session. Within two hours, I heard a deep track from They Might Be Giants' Apollo 18 and a bit of Soul Coughing.

Because I support the idea of public radio and my listening costs the station real resources (I'm pulling bandwidth, rather than grabbing already-distributed airwaves), I pitched in a little bit during the last pledge drive. Apparently, MPR sells its member lists to organizations like the Walker Art Center—I expect this package I got is the first of many Minnesota-centered publicity I will receive in Illinois:

What I don't get is how they got my name wrong. I paid by Credit Card online, so it must have been right (the CC company wouldn't have processed the charge if I had mistyped my name). So how did my name get mis-typed on the Walker mailing list? I would assume they could just transfer the names digitally.

An anecdote from my days as a temp: I had a two-week stint working for Microsoft (this would have been in, say, the summer of 1996 or 97) in which my job was to take data from one spreadsheet (all typed) and enter it into another database. I spent the whole two weeks of data entry pondering why Microsoft hadn't worked out a way to transfer the data without a bunch of keyboard monkeys like myself as intermediaries.

Posted by briley at April 22, 2005 10:04 AM