Six hours

There’s such a thing as “too much of the CBC”. That is what I learned today.

I went into work for six hours (because the pay is lucrative but I find it difficult to work for any large amount of time due to the fact I have “school” ). From noon until six today, I mostly sat down in the basement of the Chapples Building and carefully sorted paper from paperclips, the former going into a container to be shredded. This humdrum existence was periodically punctuated by brief trips upstairs to return a full bin and downstairs with an empty bin.

By 5:30 I sort of ran out of steam. I had been listening to CBC Radio One for nearly six full hours by that time. A number of revelations flashed through my mind!

You start to notice how often the host cuts off the guest by interrupting them. I started counting how many times the hosts would say “Okay,” or some other acknowledgement until they had to actually step in and blatantly talk over the guest in order to end the segment. It’s just like listening for people’s intakes of breath before they talk, it’s this bad habit I latch onto after listening to something for any period of time.

Oh, and the hourly world news things? Yeah, they record that. They have about two different recordings for the day that tell the same stories in different orders. After four hours, I realised that they were repeating it word for word. It’s not so much the fact that they record it, I can understand, but I guess no one counts on anyone actually listening to the radio for four hours and finding out that the eagerly-anticipated hourly news turns out to be a rerun from two hours ago.

By 5:30, I was running out of steam. Rex Murphy’s Cross Country Checkup was on. Rex Murphy is cool, not because of who he is, but because the CBC actually pays him money to pontificate with his large vocabulary about any sort of subject. It’s the kind of thing that only the CBC can get away with; those American stations all have their personalities who espouse their points of view, but Rex Murphy seems like the only one who can be blatantly biased and still come off seeming like an intelligent individual.

I think it’s the accent.

Anyway, so I was listening to Cross Country Checkup, where there’s an issue and people from across the country phone in with their take on it. Today was “gun violence amongst inner city youths,” in response to the alarming increase in (you guesed it) gun violence in Toronto. Scarily enough, I was actually tempted to phone in. I was saved from actually touching a phone by the rationalisation that I had nothing to say on the subject. I‘m sure that, had I touched the phone, something disastrous would have happened, like, say a meteor strike that completely wipes out human life on the planet.

The moral of the story: listening to the CBC is good. I like the CBC. I just don’t think I’ll ever try listening to it for six hours straight ever again.