| The man behind the voice You may not know Peter Schline’s name, but you know his voice. It’s filled your ear with news of water-main breaks, road closures, and power outages for years. If we get enough snow this winter, it might even give you the day off. “Whenever I meet people or when I speak at a meeting for the first time, people are like, ‘Hey, You’re the guy! You’re the voice!” says Schline, who has recorded messages for the Information Line for 14 years as AU’s director of Communication Services. “People always seem surprised. I guess maybe they thought we brought in Robert Redford or someone to do voice-over work, but it’s just me.” Informally known as “Telecommu-nications Billboard,” the Information Line provides constant updates on the university’s operating status at 885-1100 and occasionally broadcasts emergency information to the campus via voice mail, but Schline remembers a time when his voice was a daily part of life at AU. “Oh boy, that was tough,” he says with a laugh, recalling the days before Today@AU when he recorded each day’s slate of events and announcements as a two-minute voice mail broadcast to the entire campus. The medium, he explains, presented some unique challenges. “With some of these names of foreign dignitaries and visiting writers . . . I was just like, sheesh, am I even close with this one?” he says, smiling as he shakes his head at the memory. “I’d probably be putting a Russian accent on an Indian name. Most people probably didn’t know, but those who were in the know were likely thinking, where did we get this guy?” In addition to pronunciation challenges and the struggle to hold the message to the two-minute time limit, Schline often faced complaints about the format of the announcements. Though he recalls that some people called to thank him for his daily messages, others shared their frustration over having to listen to the entire recording each day just to hear the one or two items of interest to them. “It was a tough crowd to please,” he recalls with a chuckle. “There was no win in that situation for me . . . Some days I expected to walk out and find my car on fire in the parking lot.” When Today@AU was introduced in 2001, giving people the option to quickly scroll through the announcements and read only the ones of interest to them, no one was happier than Schline. “That was like the Fourth of July for me,” he says. “It was my day of liberation.” As much as the Information Line may define how the campus knows Schline, however, it’s actually just a small part of his job. His core responsibility is managing a team of 4 full-time and 10 part-time technicians who maintain the university’s communications systems. That includes equipping new and renovated buildings for voice, data, TV, and wireless, and responding to any outages in those systems—which can be a rather thankless task. “The only time you really think about your phone is when there’s a problem,” he says. “You pick it up; you expect it to work, and it will work literally hundreds of days in a row. But then you pick it up one day and there’s nothing there, and it’s, ‘What the heck is wrong with this? Whose responsible for these things?’ Then we get the call, and obviously we’re going to fix that as quickly as possible.” Though it only takes up a small percentage of his time, voicing the Information Line still offers Schline one of the tasks for which he receives the most thanks—announcing a snow day. “It’s always nice to give people the day off,” he says. “Though I’ve got nothing to do with the decision, I’m happy to give that message. Of course [because snow closures need to be announced by 6:00 a.m.] I’m doing that at 5:30 or quarter to six in the morning, so I’m probably still half asleep at the time.” —MG |
