Haunted CD Players...

We finally made the big move to Greenville, SC from that hole in the wall little office building in Columbus, NC. Beautiful new building. . . Same crusty-assed studio gear. . . including the consumer-grade Technics CD players. Everything was humming along nicely. . . Until. . .

The studio was built in a corner office which had glass from the floor to the ceiling. It was pretty cool.

So about 2am, the CD players started going nutty. . . Re-cuing, changing tracks, stopping and opening for no reason. I began to notice that this seemed to only happen when I was not sitting at the board. It happened most of the time when I was leaving the studio or returning to it. At first, I thought it might be the vibration of me walking around, bit this was an office building. . . Concrete floors and low cut commercial carpeting. There is no way I was shaking ANYTHING!

Over the next month or so, the engineers were in and out messing with the CD players to try to figure it out. They thought that maybe it was the rigged up remote starts, power spikes and a host of other "intelligent" ideas. . .

Over time, I started to notice that every time the CD players acted fruity, it was between 1am and 2am. . . AND I could see the cleaning crew in the other building next to ours. Pretty soon, I noticed that they were always in the same suite when it happened. I started to get the idea that this might have something to do with the problem.

Over the next few weeks, I watched closely to prove my theory that it was the Asian cleaning crew in the other office building that was somehow freaking out my CD players. One night while loading up a CD, I noticed that the CD players had infrared remote receiver eyes on them. I thought "Wouldn't it be funny if somehow, there was an infrared alarm in that office suite that when people were moving around caused the alarm to emit light that was somehow getting reflected into the studio. . . " It would certainly explain why it wasn't happening when I was sitting there. . . The CD players couldn't see that office as long as I was sitting in front of them.

I went into the engineering dungeon, got a roll of electrical tape and covered the remote sensors. The problem instantly disappeared.

my friends, That's a lot of 'telligence for 4 bux an hour!