What is This and What is it Doing at a Radio Station? [PHOTO]

Radio stations can be like flea markets in the fact that you never know what you're going to find.

If you were to ask any random person on the street to describe what they'd see if they were to walk into radio building, I assume the answer would include microphones, headphones, mixing boards, computers, etc. All of which is 100% true. But we do have our fair share of oddities as well. Usually items left over from past promotions that were put on a shelf only to be forgotten about until someone needs to move it out of the way to store more stuff that will be forgotten about.

More times than not, I can tell you what one of these random items is and why we have it, but every once in a while, I'll find something completely foreign that I can't explain. For example, this thing that has been sitting on a cart under our coat rack for weeks:

After walking past it countless times a day as it sits between my office and the break room, my curiosity finally got the best of me so I picked it up and pressed the button next to the handle not knowing what would happen. For all I knew flames could have come shooting out the tapered end, or based on it's condition, the whole thing could have blown up in my hands.

With a slight nervousness, I pressed the button.

A small motor inside began whir, followed by a strong, steady stream of air blowing out the end. OK, it's a blower of some kind. Part of the mystery solved. But where did it come from, and why do we have it. A trip to the curators of oddities, the engineering department, was in order.

Turns out, this thing is the blower motor from an old canister vacuum. How we obtained it, I'm still not sure, but they use it like an industrial size can of keyboard cleaner, blowing dust out of important electronic equipment that keep the stations on the air.

That's when it hit me that I was involved in its use one time earlier this year. Remember when the Harlem Shake was a thing? We did one of our own and used it to blow the hair of our internet queen, Ashley. She's the one at the bottom of the screen wearing the yellow coveralls (another one of those, "why do we have these" item).

Why we have it plugged into the wall, sitting on a cart under the coat rack remains a mystery, but there are some questions that just don't need to be answered.