WNYC Saga Continues...

A letter scribed by a friend of this blog:

FWD.

Dear Mr Gardino,

I'm sad to report that many of your "...highly educated, affluent, well-traveled... discriminating...
...intelligent, active and passionate...." listeners (as your web-page so kindly states) have come to seriously dread having to listen to the young woman that now races dizzyingly through 95% of your underwriter announcements as if they were small-print disclaimers at the end of a pharmaceutical commercial. In fact it's to the point that many of us now rush to mute the sound, change the station, or turn off the radio the moment we hear her voice -- not the intended response, presumably!? But that breathy, coquettish, little-girl voice of hers, delivered with such a bizarrely over-enunciated and gleefully hepped-up delirium somehow manages to combine the hollow and cloying exuberance of a TV commercial with the Stepford Wife creepiness of a computer generated entity like Amtrak's 'Julie', Yahoo's 'Jenni' or Sprint's short-lived
'Claire'. All no doubt designed to be pleasing and soothing, but actually quite the reverse for many of us, and very much at odds with the spirit of WNYC, to which we gratefully turn (or used to) for some blessed relief from all that crassly manipulative and increasingly
alienating commercialism out there.

I enclose a few sample blog comments so you know that I'm not alone in being driven to distraction by her oddly disturbing voice and persona, plus -- with a nod of thanks to the Gotham City Insider -- a couple of links to the threads where I found them :

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Julia said : I found this post when I googled WNYC underwriter announcer. I am so glad that I am not the only person who cannot stand the sound of this woman's voice. I have to turn the radio off during her announcements.

Ariodante38 said : I stumbled upon this site because I, too, had to believe that there were others driven up the wall by this underwriter announcer's affect...it has gotten to the point where I can't listen to WNYC because hearing her oddly cheerful, strangely mechanical iterations of underwriter blurbs every ten minutes has simply become too irritating.

Chris said : Did anyone ever find out who that dreadful Stepford woman is? There's just something about the way she clips her words while intoning the obligatory litany of underwriters every half hour. Not only is her delivery style wooden, plastic, devoid of meaning and
generally annoying, but there's a discernible character in her voice which suggests a certain sickening variety false modesty and cutesyness (at least to my ears). Barf. Listening to her delivery every morning is the price I choose pay to support my local NPR station. I'll switch back to supporting them the old-fashioned way as soon as she's gone.

http://www.gothamcityinsider.com/2007/12/foiled-again-nprs-tweed-wall-of-silence.html

http://www.gothamcityinsider.com/search?q=droid

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It would be unreasonable to insist that she be taken out of the rotation entirely, since some people -- including your good self, one assumes -- clearly like her . No, all we'd ask is that you mix-in some other voices as well, as you did to such happy effect a month or so ago, when she was presumably on vacation for a couple of weeks. In fact I'm prepared to bet that many of us enjoyed her vacation considerably more than she did!

Thank you for your kind attention,

Yours etc.....