It's not often you turn on a Toronto radio station and hear the host complaining about everything going wrong. But that's what happened to substitute morning man Jason Agnew Friday, just minutes after his boss, Robert Turner,  texted him to tell him how great he was sounding.

The main problem seemed to be that his mic suddenly stopped working. He played a clip of a story and then tried to do a back sell to it, only to find it suddenly didn't work. Instead he had to finagle his way over to the one and only mic that still seemed to be functioning, with his headset cord stretched awkwardly across the studio.

Because of the new arrangement, his producer can no longer hear the show and has to rely on either instinct or guesswork to make sure everything going on air is what's supposed to be there. 

All this was taking place during the Roundtable, which has three guests all talking to each other. 

To make matters worse, Agnew let it slip that "the engineers are on their way in," which I take to mean that no one is on duty at the station itself because of the holiday. So the Agnew agony will continue until they get there. 

I've related before that I used to have a nightmare that would wake me up on occasion, that I was in a control room live on air and nothing - the mics, the carts, the turntables (in those days), the phones - was working. The song ended and there was endless dead air and I couldn't do anything about it. 

It's not quite that bad but my nightmare almost happened to Agnew on Friday morning. And I have to admit I alternately had to laugh but also felt terrible for him. My dream came true - but thankfully, not for me!

[Update: He just told listeners that things are getting back to normal, but no word on what caused everything to malfunction at once. But hey, at least he was honest with his audience, so I'll give him credit for that.]