I'm on the Phone...

Today felt different.

Maybe it was because I didn't have a good day yesterday.

Maybe it was because my boss is on vacation for the week and therefore I didn't have to get up for work like I usually do.

But I'm pretty sure it had to do with the fact that Karl the Call Screener wasn't there today.

That doesn't necessarily seem like something that would make today seem all the different, per se.

The ramification, however, of Karl the Call Screener being gone is what made it significant enough to affect my entire day: I took over for Karl the Call Screener today.

By. My. Self.

I arrived at my internship like I usually do (well, that's not completely true...usually I work at the Education Department on good ol' Northwestern College campus, but my aforementioned boss is on her aforementioned vacation, and so I got to my internship earlier than I usually do on Thursdays...but that's beside the point). I talked to Kelly Lynn (and had quite an interesting conversation with her...sometimes it's nice to talk to people that don't really have any connection in your life...gives fresh perspective) and got a couple assignments to work on before the show like coming up for questions for Friday's Contest of Biblical Proportions and creating a couple bumpers (one of which was from a Carman song entitled "God's Got an Army," which totally took me back to Junior year in High School...ah memories), among other things. Anyhow, the first two hours flew by and soon it was time for the show to start and my first official time being Bethany the Call Screener all by my lonesome.

It was slow at first, as is expected. I called the guest for the hour, Lee Buckley, and put her on hold, which was the easiest call screening duty I had all day. After the Kim finishes interviewing the guests, it's my job to make sure they know we have their site linked on our website. So when I got on the phone, Lee actually asked me if her interview went okay! I reassured her that it was great.

After that, we had a segment known as "Clean Joke Day." The last time Kim did clean joke day was my first day at the internship and I had to look up clean jokes on the internet. This time, I had to answer the phone for the people calling in with their clean jokes. This wasn't too bad, except that some people called in with, like, 10 minute long jokes and I didn't know what to do because other people were calling in, but they were in the middle of a joke, so I wasn't sure if I should just put them on hold or what so getting them on the air went slower than it should have. But otherwise not too bad. I had to write down two people's jokes because we didn't have time to get them on the air.

Then there was a lull. Our guest for the next segment, Rick Renner, author of Dressed to Kill: A Biblical Approach to Spiritual Warfare and Armor, called in. In the middle of the interview I got a call from someone wanting to tell a joke. I had to inform him that we were not in that segment right now, but I could write down his joke and pass it on to Kim. He declined and hung up.

Kim opened up the phone lines to listeners that wanted to ask Rick a question, but we only got a couple, which was pretty easy to handle. After that part was over, Kim opened the lines up to people that had prayer requests. I knew this was going to happen, and Kelly Lynn and I discussed the ways to screen out someone with a prayer request, which is an interesting concept as it is. We didn't get a ton of calls for that part, but enough.

The highlight of the day was getting 3 calls from one of the people on the "watch out for these callers" list. 3! In one day! I think that might be a record.

And the other highlight was getting mentioned...ON AIR! Pretty sweet.