This story is a fantasy based on real people and actual events. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
The middle section of this story is basically reminiscing about reminiscing and I hope it doesn't become too convoluted. I appreciate any feedback!
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My first job out of college was working at an AM radio station. I worked what they call the "graveyard shift," from midnight to 8am on Friday and Saturday nights. I spent most of the time playing reruns of Rush Limbaugh's show. I wasn't really into politics, but I still found myself getting annoyed at some of the idiotic things that he said. I did the job for about seven months in all. The money was awful, and I became completely nocturnal, but it was a job in my field, and radio was a tough field to get into. You had to pay your dues, and I was definitely paying mine. So I was glad to be where I was, while hoping it would lead to something more.
About the only thing that the station manager said to me when I began the job was that I should do whatever I needed to do to stay awake. Many a night that was quite a challenge. The last hour on Sunday morning was reserved for a recording of a local church sermon. The ancient reel to reel tape would usually arrive sometime during the night, and pretty much once you hit play there was nothing else to do for that whole hour. My first week in training my trainer and I both fell asleep in that last hour. Some mornings I would nod off, and pick my head up just in time to see the news man standing in the booth on the closed circuit camera, preparing for me to cut away to the hourly news report.
The station itself was located on the outskirts of Baltimore, in an area dubbed TV Hill, because most of the local affiliates had their studios right along that street. We shared a building with one of the network stations, and there was an FM station across the hall from the AM studio. In the middle of the night there were usually only four people in the building, the security guard, the overnight FM disk jockey, the guy playing reruns and infomercials on the TV station, and me.
The job itself wasn't so hard. You started a new tape at the beginning of every hour, and you had to play the commercials during the breaks. If you paid even a little attention to talk radio you'd know that the breaks always come at more or less the same time, so it was pretty safe to wander around in between spots, knowing you'd have eight minutes or ten minutes or whatever. I would walk down to the cafeteria and get a snack, or into the production room right across the hall to mess around. Sometimes I would stop at the big window in the hall that looked out on the city of Baltimore. It was a majestic sight, the city all lit up at night.
I also had access to the "800" number that was used during the day for the call in shows. Fifteen years ago, before unlimited cell phone calling plans, this was a big deal. Long distance calls actually used to cost money! I would have family and friends call me during the night so that we could chat for free.
We had a computer set up by the radio console. At first it didn't do much. It offered the standard selection of games, and I got hooked on minesweeper. For my first few months there I would sit down, start the first tape, and spend the next eight hours playing minesweeper, pausing only when I needed to play commercials or change tapes.
A few months into my time there the computer was wired for internet. It was 1998, and it was kind of a big deal. I never really had unrestricted access to the internet before. I had played around with it a little bit on the library computers at school. Of course, being a pervert, and being too naïve at the time to really think about potential consequences, I quickly gravitated towards pornography. They told me to do whatever it took to stay awake, right? At least I was smart enough to delete the browser history at the end of the night. Internet pornography in 1998 was much different than it is now. Broadband was still a very new concept, and nearly everybody was still using dialup, which was slow and unreliable, so there were no streaming videos. If you were lucky you might get some thumbnail photos that may or may not load, but for the most part the websites had nothing to offer but stories. I would surf around looking for dirty stories to read, and I read them all night long. I never jerked off at work, though. Actually, scratch that, I think I did cum, just once, but usually I would wait until I got home to jerk off, my dirty mind full of the previous night's reading. I shared a crappy two bedroom townhouse off campus with a female friend. She graduated at the same time as me and was working in retail. We hardly even saw each other because I would be going to bed when she woke up most days.
I did have a girlfriend, believe it or not. What had started out as a wonderful dorm romance a year before had pretty much burned itself out. She had actually broken up with me a couple of months into the job, only to have us gravitate back together a month or so later. The sorry truth was our relationship was like a zombie, going on mindlessly, pointlessly, waiting for someone or something to finally put it out of its misery. I had issues, she had issues. Considering that I had an apartment with my own room and she lived in the dorm with a roommate, she never came to stay with me. That in itself should tell you all you need to know. I would wake up in the afternoon on Friday and Saturday, usually around 4pm, and head over to campus to see her. We would go out to dinner, alone or with friends, maybe watch a movie, and go back to her room to make love, at least as long as her roommate was away for the weekend. At 11:30 I would leave to go to work. It was a strange, strange situation.
My girlfriend used to have these elaborate fantasies. Many of them involved her being a damsel in distress, and her finding herself in life-threatening situations that were never going to happen in a million years. Another one involved visiting a disk jockey in an otherwise empty radio station at night. That seemed more possible, but as our relationship crumbled it seemed like it was never going to happen. In the beginning when I was on the campus radio station, well, it would have been impossible because I was on in the afternoons and the station was still bustling with activity. Several of our friends also had shifts on the station, and frankly we got enough of them barging in on us in the dorm. We had very little chance for privacy. Many times when we were together with our friends we would snuggle under the covers and fondle each other out of sight. I always wondered if our friends knew what was going on under the covers, but nobody ever said anything to us. Luckily, we were too aware of our surroundings to get caught doing anything more than making out.
I finished school that fall semester and graduated. I had plans to stay in the Baltimore area, but as spring arrived it became clear that my two overnight shifts weren't enough to support myself. I looked around for a second job but I came up empty. I was going to have no choice but to leave when my lease was up and go back home, 250 miles away. My hopes of staying near my college town were dashed. I was going to have to give up this radio job, and moving away meant I might never get the disk jockey job I hoped for. Also, after a brief and surprisingly emotionless conversation with my girlfriend, it was also going to be the end of our relationship. Neither of us had any interest in keeping things going long distance.
Needless to say I was seriously depressed as I headed to work that night. Instead of starting my customary web browsing as soon as I was settled, I slumped into my chair, started the first tape of the night, and started thinking about my girlfriend.
I was a 21 year old virgin, shy and introverted, starting my fourth year of college. It was freshman move-in day, and a friend of mine and I were sitting by my dorm window watching the chaos unfold below us. I had chosen a room that was on the fourth floor, facing the quad formed by the two other tall dorms and the dining hall. It was an ideal viewing location for moments like this. We were enjoying ourselves so much we didn't even notice there was a stranger standing in the doorway.
