FB Friend: Jennifer Murphy
When I first met Jennifer Murphy, today’s “Awesome Facebook Friend Of The Day,” she was Jennifer Muller. It was 1988 and she was the administrative assistant at WLIX on Long Island, NY where I’d just started working.
At first Jennifer seemed all business, very proper. But as I got to know her I found her to be very warm and caring. She loves the Lord, and that became clearly evident the longer we worked together. And she was fun, could take a joke as well as she could give it. Good thing. Jen was responsible for keeping the office supplies stocked, and that included the coffee. And she had a pretty comprehensive and efficient system. What she hadn’t counted on was the meteoric increase in our coffee consumption once I came on board. We ran out of coffee one day. But we still had plenty of paper towels. Somewhere in Jennifer’s system coffee and paper towels were related, and the system didn’t allow us to order more coffee until we were ready to order more paper towels.
Well I needed coffee. So I did the only thing any self respecting morning man would do. I staged “The Great Paper Towel Give-Away.” Any coffee-loving listener who called in would win an autographed paper towel (suitable for framing) and I’d be that much closer to a fresh supply of coffee. The “promotion” lasted for one morning show. Jennifer relented and ordered more coffee. She took it better than I’d hoped, laughing it off as another stunt by that wacky new morning guy. And, I think, we got a little closer after that.
Somewhere along the line Jennifer got married and left the station. And as too often happens we lost track of each other. Then one day in the early 2000s I was doing the morning show at WVFJ in Atlanta and got a call. It was Jennifer. She’d moved to the area and was listening. Since then, mainly thanks to Facebook, we’ve managed to keep a little better track of each other. I spoke with her not all that long ago. She was finishing up school and getting ready to start another phase of life. She’s doing well and seems genuinely happy. And it’s nice to know there’s another New York transplant in the area.
