I was listening to the radio last night while coming back from campus, and I heard that Rip Hamilton was about to be coming on Jim Rome’s show. I haven’t listened to Rome in forever, and in all honesty I didn’t know that he was on the local DC-based WJFK affiliate. Nor did I realize that his show was on so late, as it was some time after 9p.m. last night.

Anyways, so I flip back over to Rome after the commercial to hear Hamiltion, and as Rome introduces the Detroit Pistons sharp-shooter, you could tell that Rip had a bad connection. He responded to Rome’s having asked him what’s up with a, “Nu—, I’m —.” The — in this example means undecipherable static.

Rome said right away, “woah now, we can’t be having this connection,” and then he asked his producer to take Rip off the air and get him to fix whatever was going on. Then he said that, he didn’t “want to play the “are you there now” game tonight.” While that line was kind of funny, and one that I’ve used before, I didn’t like the way that he handled the bad-phone situation. He made Hamilton leave the show, then come back on, which I thought was a waste of time and also somewhat rude to the player who was guesting on his show.

Now flip ahead to this morning. It’s 6:25am and I’m guzzling down some water so I don’t sound like I was just sleeping. I’m about to go on a show, XMSN This Morning with TJ Rives, that I go on every Thursday at the same time. I’m sitting in the same chair that I’ve sat in for my last 20 or-so appearances on TJ’s show. I’m about three-feet from a window, and my service doesn’t tend to malfunction in this corner of the room.

After about two minutes of being on with TJ, I hear him say, “I guess Grant has bad phone problems, we’ve lost him.” Then the producer of the show, Nate Bortnick, comes onto the line and asks me a few questions like where I’m at and whether or not I’m walking around. I tell him that I wasn’t, and he says I sound better. I’m not leaning up against the door, on the other side of the room I was in a minute or so earlier when TJ lost me.

So I get back on the air and we pick up where I left off. About two-minutes later, the phone cuts out again, effectively ending my segment. There’s an unwritten rule in radio that after two mess-ups, a phone can no longer be trusted. Depending on the guest though, a third try might be given, but the guest would have to be a Bob Costas or a Tony LaRussa or something for that to be the case. I don’t qualify.

Long story short though, after the interview ended, as I stared at my non-trustworthy phone, I wondered why today it didn’t work. Why was it that after all these days in the same spot doing interviews, today it decided to crap out? And then I realized. It was because I critiqued the way Rome had handled Hamilton’s issues the night before. I called him our for over-reacting to a bad-cell, and in turn I had triggered my phone to be bad the next morning.

It’s called karma friends, and it came back to bite me this morning.