Around the mid-1990s, the Atlanta police apparently decided that the best way to improve the quality of life in Atlanta was to seize as many rusted old unusable guns as possible—and to get vibrators off the streets.
Now, I’ve done my due diligence, but for the life of me I was never able to track down those statistics on vibrator-related crimes during the years in question. But it must have been substantial indeed, because one night we were treated to news of police raids on several so-called “adult shops” in Atlanta, where boxloads of vibrators were seized.
Can’t you just imagine how well Atlanta slept the next night without the threat of all those vibrators lurking around in the dark, ready to pounce on any unsuspecting citizen who might happen by? The buzzing alone was affecting the sleep of so many in the affected neighborhoods.
Being a community-minded talk show host, and recognizing the threat posed to the health and safety of my fellow Atlantans by the Great Vibrator Epidemic, I decided that I should be part of the solution…since I certainly wasn’t part of the problem.
Those rusty old guns I mentioned? Well, around the time of the crackdown on vibrators, various groups around town were also trying to address the issue of crimes committed with handguns through gun buyback programs. Gun buyback programs have to rank at the top of the list of mindless feel-good attempts to address a serious problem in the history of our republic. I once had a statistician from Georgia Tech study these much-hyped programs to determine their effectiveness in reducing murders committed with handguns. To reach a statistical certainty of saving one human life, he found, you would have to buy back about 65,000 handguns. That means that Atlanta’s gun buyback programs have not yet saved a single human life. And yet you’ll find no shortage of antigun nuts arguing that a life is saved for virtually every gun turned in.
My statistician, alas, was stymied by a lack of data on vibrator-related crime. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. After all, if the vibrator problem was so serious that the police were spending precious time rounding those suckers up and impounding them, then certainly it was serious enough to warrant my attention and assistance. We needed to get those vibrators off the streets.
I didn’t have a cash fund, like the cops running the handgun buyback program, but I did have some baseball tickets. So, without alerting anybody in advance,1 I took to the airwaves and announced the Neal Boortz Vibrator Buyback Program.
I told my listeners that the first ten women (I don’t know why I said women; that kind of discrimination just isn’t in my nature) who came to WSB to turn in their vibrators would receive a pair of tickets to that night’s baseball game.
I guess I just didn’t fully think this thing through.
At that time, any listener coming to WSB to claim a prize would be directed to our mailroom. The mailroom was under the charge of a pleasant but somewhat straitlaced gentleman who shall remain nameless. This man had worked at WSB through the decades of “Music for Quilting,” and just wasn’t ready for the type of chaos an errant talk show host can generate. He was sitting there quietly, sorting the mail, when he heard a growing clamor down the hall and around the corner. Suddenly he was confronted by a wall of not-all-that-pleasant women, waving vibrators in his face and demanding baseball tickets.
Remember, this poor man had the odds stacked against him.
And now he was faced with a mad rush of baseball-loving women, waving their sex toys in the air and demanding satisfaction.
He didn’t stand a chance.
A few weeks later, Mail Guy retired. We haven’t heard from him since.
That’ll teach me to get involved with community outreach.