Good Vibrations, or, Warning: This Blog is Rated R for its “Contents”.

     Wednesday mornings, for me, are usually pretty hectic.  I’m not an early morning person, and knowing I have to be at WRBH for 6:45 to be half of the live newspaper reading team on that day means I usually have to set the alarm for 5:45, and sometimes, depending on traffic, snooze buttons, and how tired I am, an hour isn’t quite enough time to get there before the Wall Street Journal ends and the live reading begins.  May Day was one of those mornings.  I arrived at 6:55, unlocked the door, threw my purse on my chair, grabbed a cup of water and my reading glasses, and darted into the studio with barely a minute before I could clear my throat, watch for Tim to point his finger at me in order to give the “start” signal and begin the broadcast by saying, “Good morning!  Today is Wednesday, May 1st, and your readers are…”  I had noticed the big brown box addressed to me on my desk when I came in, but there wasn’t enough time to open it.  Also, as the coordinator of Writers’ Forum program,  I get a lot of packages.  Usually, they are padded envelopes containing books, which I then have to look over and decide to which reader they should be assigned.  Once I got a parcel with three different kinds of See’s candy inside, a special thanks sent by an author for recording her book onto CDs so that Stephen King could listen to it (evidently he’s not a big reader) before writing a blurb on the back cover.  There was enough decadent chocolate in that package for everybody, so divvying it up was easy–we all took some home.  This box seemed pretty large for books, and it wasn’t really heavy.  It also seemed awfully big to be candy, although if you love chocolate as much as I do, hope springs eternal.

     So by 9 am, with the live newspaper reading over and the rest of the WRBH staff on their second cups of coffee, my interest had been piqued.  So had Natalia’s, who stood next to my desk looking at the box.  “What’s inside?” she asked.  “No idea,” I answered.  “Who’s it from?” she wondered.  “Don’t know these names,” I said.  “Open it,” she urged, “it might be something fun!”

Fun.  Well, um, hmmmm.  After struggling with the packing tape, I lifted the lid…and closed it again.  Natalia looked at me in surprise.  I checked the contents again, opened my mouth to speak, closed it, and once more shut the lid.  “Well, what IS it?” Natalia said, dying of curiosity.  By my reaction, you’d think we’d gotten a box of anthrax, or ricin, or a ticking time bomb.  It wasn’t any of those things, though.  More like sticks of dynamite.

“It’s…VIBRATORS!” I said in shock.

Yes, folks, I had received a package with SIX, count ’em, SIX, Trojan vibrators.  Three had interchangeable heads, and three had different speeds.  All were in fancy silver and purple boxes, as lovely as boxes of candy, except that this sure wasn’t candy.  This was a really large box of embarrassing.

After we finished shrieking with laughter and amazement, we read the PSA enclosed in the package.  Turns out they were sent as promotional gifts to radio stations in order to advertise a special event, and as PSA coordinator for the On the Town program, they were sent to me because my name is listed as the contact person. For your information, on May 3rd, from four to eight p.m. at the House of Blues, Trojan is having a vibrator giveaway, featuring two models, the Tri-Phoria (with three different heads) and the Pulse (with three different speeds.)  They will be distributed from the “Pleasure Cart”, a small wheeled truck that resembles a hot dog vendor’s wiener stand in the Quarter.  Yes, I know what you’re thinking.  We thought it too.  In fact, the whole rest of the day was given over to giggling, double entendres, and crazy ideas on what exactly we were going to DO with them (and no, absolutely not, you dirty minded reader, we certainly didn’t discuss what we would DO with them in private, just how on earth the station was actually going to deal with a box of vibrators.)  Among our many brainstorms: maybe they could be door prizes at the golf tournament?  “Only if they get a hole-in-one,”  Tim suggested.  After a cascade of jokes about putters, strokes, Big Berthas, birdies, etc., we moved on to the idea of selling them on e-Bay.  That idea “petered out” when we couldn’t figure out how to word the ad so that it would seem perfectly normal for a reading radio station to be selling six $40 sex aids.  Special gifts for volunteers?  Define special.  No way.  So far, the only way they have been useful is to provide unlimited snickering and tons of immature jokes for the blog.  Eventually we gave up and all went back to work.

So, at the present time I have a big box of vibrators behind my desk.  Life was sure a lot simpler when books and candy were the things that came in the mail.