Friend Zone #4: Graz

I first met Graz on Halloween of 1986. Tod was training her as a potential employee at KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM. I had just come back from a concert at Eastern New Mexico University in which I had gotten to go backstage. I remember Tod was dressed up as a clown that night, even though the only people who were going to see him were Graz and me.

At the time, she was a freshman at ENMU in the Radio/TV Department. She had gone to high school in Raton. She was Hispanic with short hair and glasses. She was noticeably overweight, but she was rather cute. We never did hire her, but she hung around with us a couple of weeks later when the KZZO Mobile Music Machine played a dance in the Campus Union Building Ballroom.

One night, she called me up when I was working my overnight shift and we started talking. We talked for about three hours. She was definitely interested in me. The Theatre Department at ENMU was doing a production of the play, "Talley's Folly." I asked her if she would like to go with me. She agreed.

About a week before the date, KZZO did a live remote at the Clovis Zoo. (We loved doing "The Zoo at the Zoo" promotions.) They had just gotten a giraffe. Graz and her roommate hung around with me and Tod most of the time. I don't recall her roommate's name, but I remember that she had long, dark red hair. She was also what you would call a "two-face." If you saw her from one angle, she was attractive. If she turned her head, she wasn't so pretty. It was weird.

After we were done with the remote at the Clovis Zoo, I tried to find her, but she and her roommate were nowhere to be found. I went home. My phone rang. She called me and told me she still wanted to hang out with me, so I went to meet her and her roommate at Long John Silver's. We ate and talked for awhile.

The big night for the date arrived. I dressed up and drove down to De Baca Hall, where she and her roommate lived. I went to the front desk and called her to come down. She brought me back to her room. (I mentioned earlier that there was only one other time in college that I had gotten to go inside a woman's dorm room.) We hung out with her roommate until it was time for us to go to the Theatre, which was a short walk.

What we were actually seeing was the final dress rehearsal, so we were the only ones in the audience, with the exception of the director (who had given me permission to come to the rehearsal). But this wasn't so strange because there's only two cast members in the play. (When the audience outnumbers the cast, that's considered a good outcome in theatre. I've experienced the opposite, but that's a story for another post way in the future.)

I walked her back home after the performance. We had enjoyed it. I had to get back home so I could work my overnight shift, so I couldn't hang out for very long.

A few days later, she called and asked me to be a part of her Video Production class project. She just needed me to come down and do an interview. The only bad thing was that the class was at 10am, so that meant I only got to sleep a couple of hours before I had to show up. I came down and did the interview, went straight back and crawled into bed. I don't recall much about it except that I got to see my old TV professor Dr. G again and that some people had comments about my hair, which covered most of my face at the time.

Graz called me at the station a couple of more times after that. From the things she was saying, it was apparent that I wasn't the only one who thought she was cute. She indicated there were several other guys talking to her and one of them was Lid. I tried to set up another date, but she wouldn't commit to anything.

One time, I suddenly had to drive some equipment from the station to the Mobile Music Machine in Portales. I was a mess because I hadn't taken a shower that day. Since I was in the neighborhood, I called Graz and told her I was in town. She said she had made other plans. I was rather relieved, because I was in pretty bad shape. But I still wanted to see her. She said she would call me. But she never did again.

I never did see her again. Later, I wondered if her entire interest in me was strictly related to her attempts to get a job with us. That would have meant that she used me. But I didn't feel used at the time.

As her name is rather common, I have been unable to find what's she's been up to or where she might be now. When I would drive back and forth between Denver and Artesia, I would pass through Raton. I always expected to run into her there, but that just didn't happen.

This also wound up being the last time I dated a student at ENMU.

Work Enemy: Dod

I knew Dod as a fellow Radio/TV student at Eastern New Mexico University. The first class we shared together was during my junior year when we were both in audio production. At that time, he was working where I used to work, at KENM/KNIT in Portales. He next worked at KCLV in Clovis. I don't know what happened, but he stopped working there and Tod, who was a friend of his, hired him to work part-time at KZZO in early 1987.

I never really thought he was that good of a DJ. He didn't have a standout personality and his voice kind of had a dull edge to it. It always sounded like he had a dirty rag covering the microphone when he was on the air. But he was able to do the announcing, stick to the format and didn't try any funny stuff, like breaking format or making sexually suggestive comments.

We had a sudden change in our staffing in which the guy who worked six to midnight was going to be doing the morning show. Dod was hired full time and placed in the slot. I lobbied hard to get that shift and they decided to give it to me, but made me wait until after my planned vacation to officially take over the slot. Dod worked that six to midnight shift for about three weeks until I came back. He then went to the overnight shift.

We had staffing turmoil again when Tod and Daz quit their jobs. I thought I was going to get to move into the afternoon drive shift, but Jid gave it to Dod. I really didn't have a problem with that. I enjoyed the six to midnight shift as it was much better than overnights. I found out later that the reason why they put Dod there was because he had a tendency to pretend he was an engineer and try to fix things when he was left alone at the station at night. He would wind up wrecking the equipment if there wasn't someone there in the station to keep an eye on him. Dod was also named the Production Manager.

Dod did something that messed up a good deal for the staff at the station. This couple started a business making submarine sandwiches. (This was just a few months before the first Subway opened in the area.) They purchased advertising on our station. I went there to buy a sandwich. They told me the sandwich was free because they were doing business with us. They did this in hopes of getting us to mention them more on the air for "free" advertising. It actually worked. I went down to the station and told Dod they were letting us have free sandwiches. I said it was probably a good idea if we didn't hit them up more than once a week. I came in a couple of days later, and he had one of their sandwiches in the studio. I didn't think much of it. A couple of days later, I saw he had another sandwich at 3pm. I asked the Program Director if Dod had gotten the sandwich before coming in to work. He said no, Dod had them DELIVER the sandwich and he had been doing that every day for the past week. He also told me that everyone at the station had been trying to get him to stop doing that, but he just kept on calling them up and they'd still deliver the sandwich. Sure enough, we stopped getting the free sandwiches about a week later.

One thing that irritated me about Dod was something he did every single day on his shift. If we had songs that we weren't allowed to play until after 3pm, he would play all of them during his 3:00 hour. We were supposed to rotate them. You might not think this was a problem, but imagine being that one person who happens to tune in every day at 3pm and always hear the exact same songs at the exact same times. There wasn't anything I could do about it, but he certainly didn't realize how bad it made us sound.

We only ever had disagreements on music and the way I was handling things as Music Director. If he didn't like a new song that I added, he would gripe about it every single time he played the song when I was in the vicinity. He would continue to do this even though those songs climbed the charts and hit #1. Dod liked to think he was the ultimate expert on music and was constantly trying to get me to add certain songs to the current playlist and place some of his favorite songs from the 1970s (from his own collection) into our older song rotations. He would tell me, "Jid said we could add these songs into the mix." I'd say, "Well, Jid didn't tell me anything about that." The next thing I knew, Jid would come up and tell me to put those songs in.

The biggest fight we got into over music had to do with the year-end list of the Top 108 songs for 1987. I had developed a rather scientific method for determining what the top hits were locally by using our weekly playlists. When I came out with the list, he got all upset that "Rock Steady" by the Whispers wasn't the #1 song for the year. I guess it was his favorite. He claimed he got more requests for that song than any other the whole year. It was in the Top 20 of my list, but there was no way it was going to be #1 locally. (It didn't even hit #1 nationally.) He strongly suggested that I change my countdown rankings. I wasn't going to do that. I'd worked on that list for a week. New Year's Eve came, and I brought in the records and tapes for the countdown. Dod looked at the list and yelled at me, "YOU DIDN'T CHANGE THIS! I TOLD YOU 'ROCK STEADY' WAS SUPPOSED TO BE #1!" Fortunately, he was only going to be able to air numbers 100 - 40. The rest would run after his shift was over at 6pm, which meant he wasn't going to be able to make any sudden changes to the list on the air. (What was #1 that year? Los Lobos' "La Bamba." With the high concentration of Hispanics in Clovis, there was no way "Rock Steady" could have been more popular than that.)

In June of 1988, after I had put in my notice that I would be resigning from the station. Dod came up to me and told me I needed to show him how to do the playlist and reporting because he was going to be the Music Director. I told him I would figure out a good time later. I then went to the Program Director. I told him, "You know, I didn't quit my job just so Dod could become Music Director." The Program Director said, "What? No, he's not doing the music. I'm going to be doing that. I'll talk to him." I never did find out how that conversation went, but I guess Dod never did get to do the music. But it wasn't like it mattered, because everybody was just playing what they felt like because Jid no longer had a firm grip on the station.

I came back to visit the station a couple of years after I had moved to Denver. Dod was still there. Actually, he had left the station and come back. He had gotten a job as a Program Director at a station in Alamogordo, NM. The owner had a couple of sons who worked at the station as DJs. The owner told him he could do whatever he wanted to help make the station sound better, including firing his sons. The sons were pretty much worthless, so he fired them. Then the owner fired him, and he had to come back to KZZO. He was really upset about that.

That was the last time I saw him. When I searched for him on-line a few years ago, I found that he had become the General Manager for a Christian music station in Albuquerque. It doesn't look like he has that job anymore and I have no idea where he works now.

But I will leave off with this remark: When it came to women, Dod's attitude was "They're only good for one thing." I guess he had a number of bad experiences in the past and just figured that the best he could do was to get what he wanted out of them until they got tired of him (and I'm certain that happened every single time, just like how the sandwich people got tired of being used by him). Then, he'd just hook up with the next one who came along and repeat the process all over again. This would become an issue for me, but it's one I will detail in later posts.

Radio Tease #2: Branz

(What's a Radio Tease? Click here!)

Branz first contacted me during the summer of 1986. She told me she lived with her parents at Cannon Air Force Base and was going to start attending Eastern New Mexico University. I don't recall how the first conversation went, but she did call me after I had started my midnight shift. She would call me back from time to time and it seemed as if she liked me just a little bit more each time.

The only real bad thing about her was that it appeared that she made up stuff about herself, so I have no idea what was real and what wasn't. I don't even know that she told the truth about her age. (This issue was something that was actually typical of a lot of Radio Teases. They would just flat-out lie about stuff, and for no good reason.)

This is what she told me: Her father had previously been stationed in Las Vegas, NV. While she was there, she struck up a friendship with a radio DJ. One time, she ran away from home and stayed at his house. It took the cops two weeks to find her. She ran away again. This time, it only took them 30 minutes because she went to the same place. She swore there was nothing physical between the two of them.

One night we were talking on the phone and she claimed the DJ from Las Vegas was in her backyard. I tried to call her on that, explaining there was no way a DJ from Las Vegas was going to be able to get past Base Security. She kept insisting, so I told her to get off the phone and call Base Security and report it. She would not do that.

We actually did get to meet in person a first time. We had arranged to get together at Taco Box in the mall. I thought we were going to have lunch, that it was going to be an actual date, but she brought a friend along with her. On top of that, her mother had driven them there, so she could only sit down and talk for a little bit before leaving. She was actually very cute, with medium-length blonde hair. I hoped I would get to go out on a real date with her.

I know I'm not a good-looking guy, so it wouldn't have surprised me if she never called me again after that meeting. But she did. Things looked like they were progressing and we would soon be going out.

One night around 2am, she said she wanted to drive out to the station to see me. I knew I wasn't supposed to have visitors at the station, but I also knew that no one was going to find out as long as she left before 5am. I told her to go ahead and come out. I waited for an hour, but she never showed up. She later called and said the person working the front gate stopped her and made her go back home. And this was AFTER making her sit in the booth and talk with him for an hour. She wasn't being questioned, he just wanted to chit-chat. (But I don't know if ANY of this even happened.)

I kept trying to get her to go out with me. We would make plans to meet at the movie theatre, but she would cancel at the last minute. (More than cancel. She just plain wouldn't show up.) Then, she told me she started dating someone her own age who lived at the base. She said the reason why she got together with him was because he was there and I wasn't. I GOT SO ANGRY, but I didn't yell at her and let her know how I felt about her leading me on (just in case she broke up with that guy and still wanted to be with me). I thought that would be the last I would hear from her, but she still kept calling me and talking to me like we were boyfriend/girlfriend even while she was dating that guy. It drove me nuts!

On top of that, this arrangement continued even after I got a girlfriend. AND she even talked to my girlfriend from time to time. She also talked to a couple of the other Radio Teases I was trying to hook up with prior to that.

And I know that at any point, I could have just stopped talking to her and avoided frustrating myself. (That would have been a good idea.) However, it was nice that I was receiving some kind of attention from women, however sick it may have been.

But let's be certain about something: If I had been lucky enough to have gone through a few girlfriends in high school and college, I would have stopped all contact with her the second she told me she had a boyfriend. I would have told her to get lost and that I never wanted to speak to her again. A common theme with the women I became involved with was that I didn't know how long I would have to wait to get another girlfriend.

Eventually, I had to leave Clovis and move to Denver. I actually got to see her in person one last time before I left. She was able to contact the front gate at the base and get me a visitor's pass. (According to her, she'd never tried doing this before because she didn't know she could. I didn't know either, until someone else got me on the base once before.) We got to talk for about a half hour and she let me take a couple of photos of her.

I continued to call her for a few weeks after I'd moved to Denver. After I'd moved into my own apartment, I didn't have a phone. I never got to talk to her again. Her name is very common and I have been unable to locate her on-line.

The one positive thing I could take away from all this was that I was the only DJ in Clovis that she ever talked to. Later blog entries will show this was a problem with other Radio Teases.

Music in the 1980s

I worked in radio for about half of the 1980s. I saw so many changes in pop music during that period and got an interesting perspective on the direction the scene was moving as things got closer to the 1990s.

One of the things that I think marked the 1980s was that it was the last decade in which most major and upcoming artists tried to come out with a new album every year. It's interesting to note that during the mid-1960s, it wasn't uncommon for artists like the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys to come out with a new album about every four months. However, after getting a few albums under their belts, they would slow down their output, eventually putting about one album every year. This would continue to be the trend in the 1970s for most recording artists as music production got more complex and they spent more time in the studios trying to perfect their songs. Elton John was one of the few in the early part of the decade to try to match his predecessors' frenzied approach to album production with the recording techniques available at the time. Eventually, he slowed down to produce about one album a year by 1977.

In the 1980s, many new artists were lucky enough to land deals to release multiple albums. Back then, the record labels were committed to developing emerging talent, knowing that bands that toured frequently to promote their albums would build a solid fan base that would help them get to an eventual stage of profitability. Bands like U2 and REM were able to issue about one new album a year five years in a row. Now that they had a decent back catalogue with more than two hours' worth of music, they could take time to put more work into their material. Keep in mind that they had to perform a bizarre balancing act by making their music more accessible to mainstrean audiences while keeping their fans from protesting they they had "sold out." They didn't always succeed.

It drove me nuts in the 1980s when I would get all into a new band early in their career, only to wait 18 months between their first and second releases. (Channeling Veruca Salt here:) NO! I want new material NOW! I wanted to experience my new favorite band in the moment much like fans were able to in the 1960s and 1970s. And it wasn't uncommon for that long wait to not be worth it, as they went too far from their roots in an effort to be mainstream or released an album that was crap and was going to end their career.

The 1990s proved to even more frustrating than the 1980s. Many artists who hit it big with their debuts didn't see anything wrong with waiting four or five years between releases, but they didn't have a problem spending all that time touring and playing the same songs over and over.

Nowadays, if you like a certain group when you're a freshman in high school, you might have to wait until you graduate from college before you get a new release from them. And the stupid thing is that it's a strategy that often works. They've managed to build up so much anticipation and come out with a marketing blast so big that everyone forgets the long empty space in between. That's kind of why it's hard for me to get too excited about new groups. I always feel like they're just going to let me down, so why did I bother in the first place?

Another interesting aspect of music in the 1980s is that almost everything from the 1970s disappeared from airwaves after about 1984. This had to irritate a lot of fans from that era because most of their music library was on vinyl and 8-track tape, which were rapidly disappearing as viable formats. All of a sudden, they couldn't listen to the songs they grew up on or had invested in after their equipment broke or they forget to get the stereo out of the car before trading it in.

This is why there were so many people who seemed to completely embrace the music of the 1980s. If you've seen the film "Boogie Nights," the character played by Alfred Molina is really into the song "Sister Christian" by Night Ranger. People tended to immerse themselves in the music because they saw what happened to all the material from the 1970s. If this was going to go away in the 1990s (which it never did), they were going to make sure they got as much out of it as possible.

So, what did this lead to? The Classic Rock radio format. While there were several Oldies stations in major markets that mostly played music from 1955 - 1965, there weren't any that played much in later years, which means the 1970s got left out again. In the late 1980s, several stations capitalized on this and changed their formats. Most just stuck to material between 1964 and 1979. Others would also play more recent material from Classic Rock artists, regardless of whether or not it hit the Top 40. However, this format turned out to be a novelty, most noticably in medium-sized markets. I remember one Classic Rock station in Lubbock around this time. They got a lot of listeners when they debuted because so many people missed hearing that music so much. But when listeners decided they didn't need to always live in the past, they started turning back to stations that played current music. Classic Rock stations responded by cutting their massive playlists down to what they thought were the "safest" songs. But let's face it, you can only take hearing "Stairway to Heaven" around the same time every day for so long. 18 months after it debuted, I tuned into that station and heard "Everything She Wants" by Wham! My first thought was, "Well, I guess this might be considered Classic Rock, but that's stretching it." Right after the song, I noticed they had changed the name of their station.

This wouldn't be an article about music of the 1980s without mentioning the impact of MTV. There have been millions of words written about it over the last 34 years, but one of the things that I rarely see about what MTV did for pop and rock music was to get Top 40 radio to almost completely stop playing Country/Western music. After 1984, it took about eight years for Country artists to become mainstream again. I find it interesting that the comeback happened pretty close to the beginning of the whole Grunge era.

This one change in music probably impacted us at KZZO-FM in Clovis more than we would have liked. Many people in our part of the USA have a preference for County/Western music, but enjoy some of the pop and rock that was out at the time. Without playing country songs in our mix on a regular basis, we probably lost a large number of listeners. This was another reason why I didn't like our change to a Top 40 format from the original Adult Contemporary that we played when the station was K108FM. The top Country artists were a big part of the playlist.

Toward the end of my employment with KZZO as the Music Director, it was Rap and Hip-Hop music that was starting to work into the mainstream. I was very much out of my element when these artists started to become popular. I honestly couldn't tell what was good and what was bad. I only knew what I liked and what I didn't like. But I guess I wasn't the only one with this problem. When I moved to Denver, I listened to Y108, the Top 40 station there. They played the biggest hits, but they did not play any rap, not even if it hit #1 on the Billboard Pop Chart. I guess they figured that if someone wanted to listen to rap, they would easily be able to find it on another station in town. But even in this day and with the increasing popularity of Rap and Hip-Hop, there are still some pop stations that still will not play rap. I recall hearing one station play "Lady Marmalade" that cut Lil' Kim's rap section completely out.

I guess I got out of the Music Director business at about the right time. I would have hated to still be at KZZO in Clovis in 1992. Around the time, there would have been Pop, Rock, Rap, Grunge and Country all being played on the airwaves in the same mix. That was definitely the end of the 1980s, musically.

Work Enemy: Ked

I first met Ked in 1985 when I was working my usual weekend midnight shift at KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM. He was a friend of one of the other full-timers who was working that Saturday night before I came on. Ked and this other guy, Read, were hanging out with him inside the studio. (We were not allowed to have visitors inside the station outside normal business hours.) They both worked for the station in Texico, where I had applied once.

Ked was about a year older than me. He was rather tall and muscular. As it turned out, he was a bodybuilder. I know he had done some other radio before he was in Texico, but I'm not certain of the location. After I had started my shift, he continued to hang out in the studio. He was sitting in a chair, reading a trade publication. He saw that I was a little uncomfortable. He asked if I had a problem with him being in there. I replied, "A little bit," so he left. I think he got the idea that I didn't like him, but that wasn't the case. I was kind of irritated that the full-timer had allowed people from a competitor in the station late at night. That wrong impression probably started him on his enemy status.

A few months later, he was hired to work part-time by Dr. D. This was the weekend I was finally working the six to midnight shift and thought I was free of the overnights for good. Ked came in an hour early. I had remembered him from that night he was at the station. I felt a little empowered by my status changing from being the low man on the totem pole and talked to him rather straight-forward about my feelings about the station. One of the things I told him was that Dr. D had come in and made a lot of changes, but that owner Jid made him change everything back, so he didn't have as much control as he originally thought he had.

When I came in the next week to talk to Dr. D after he scheduled me back onto the overnight shift, he said he was displeased that I thought he didn't have any real power as Program Director. My first thought was that I couldn't believe that Ked would just rat me out like that. I knew I couldn't really trust Ked very well after that.

But I have a problem: I want everyone to like me. So, even though I didn't like that he had repeated what I said, I still wanted to be friends with him so we could get along as co-workers. (I have long since learned that I don't need to get along with everyone I work with. I just have to figure out how to avoid them more.)

Ked quickly became full-time after Dr. D started doing mornings with JF. This had been planned all along. I found this out after I called the station and he answered the phone. There was no announcement about this to the air staff, and I don't know why it had to be a secret.

There were a couple of things I found out about Ked in addition to him being a snitch. One was that He didn't like being wrong. The other was that if you tried to prove him wrong, he would flat-out lie.

He and Tod became roommates. Tod was the Program Director at the time. When he left to try to go back to school, Ked was named Program Director.

Somehow, Ked had managed to wrangle control from Jid to be allowed to do what he wanted. I don't know how he managed to get Jid to agree with him to do this, but he had a pretty strong sense of how the music should be run. We started sounding better again.

Ked got it in his head that he wanted to remembered in Clovis long after he left, so he tried to do EVERYTHING. He worked morning AND afternoon drive. He HAD to be the voice on almost ALL the commercials, even the promos for our syndicated programs on Sundays. Tod told me that when Dr. D was there, he was beyond doing tags on promos and usually handed that off to other staff. The fact that Ked would bother with those made him seem like a megalomaniac.

Ked even altered a political advertisement. The original voice was Edd, a DJ with KCLV. The last words on the tag identified the candidate's treasurer. Edd put this gravelly emphasis on the word "treasurer" that made him sound like a complete amateur trying to appear that he had a deep voice. Ked replaced Edd's tag with his voice, WHICH WAS SOMETHING WE'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO WITH POLITICAL ADS! We're required to run them as is. I'm surprised we didn't get in big trouble for that, but I guess no one on the campaign noticed the ads were different. The guy probably won his race, so it didn't matter.

Ked called the air staff in for a meeting one day. He told us that he had been working weekends at the station in Amarillo where Dr. D used to work. They had offered him a full-time position. Only one other person on the air staff was aware he was working there and it wasn't Tod. We were a little taken back. Tod was still continuing his educaiton, so he did not accept the Program Director position back. It went to the other guy.

About a month after he left, Ked came back and saw me when I was working an overnight shift. He apparently still had a key and came in through the back door. I found out later that what he was doing was stealing records from the Mobile Music Machine. I also found that he had stolen several records from the studio (probably before he stopped working at the station). He had taken advantage of my desire to be friends with him. There was an older song that came up in the rotation and I was looking forward to playing it. I couldn't find it. The sleeve was empty. I think he took it.

The last time I saw Ked was a few months later. I had gone to a concert in Lubbock. I went up to Will Call to get my tickets. He was also there. We quickly said hi, but that was it. I knew I didn't want to talk much more to him than that.

What I've found on him since then is pretty interesting. I know that he did radio in Neillsville, WI and Colorado Springs, CO. According to a newspaper article from five years ago, he started working in a program at a prison to teach inmates how to work at a radio station. There's a station there and the prisoners record music programs that get run throughout the day. These were actual college-level courses that could be transferred to a community college in Glenwood Springs.

The only problem was that not one of the inmates in the program had ever landed a radio job once they got out. Once potential employers found out about their background, they wouldn't hire them. This makes sense. Very likely, the only job someone is going to get out of the program will be starting the overnight shift. Who wants to leave a former inmate alone in a building with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of electronic and broadcasting equipment?

But I wonder how those inmates would have felt to find out that they were learning radio techniques from a snitch.

Going through the personnel file!

I've mentioned several problems I had with Program Director Crad, how he cut my hours and tried to make my life miserable at KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM in 1984 and 1985. It made me really paranoid that there was a conspiracy afoot that was aimed at making me quit so they could bring in some other stoner DJ to come in and sound like crap on the air.

I noticed something interesting in my employee handbook that was written by owner Jid. Everybody who worked at the station would have a personnel file. In this file would be inter-office communications, evaluations and any other information related to the employee's performance on the record. According to the handbook, we were allowed to view the personnel file.

However, there was a catch: The handbook said that in order for us to view our personnel file, we had to make an appointment for a later date and time to come in and view the file. We could not walk up to the receptionist, ask to see the file and then march immediately into the General Manager's office to look at it.

I'm pretty certain this stipulation was against the law. I mean, if there was something in the file that could be used in a discrimination or sexual harassment lawsuit, this would give the powers that be time to review the file and take out any incriminating evidence. Nope, I knew the only way I could see the file in its unfiltered and unfettered state was to get my hands on it while I was working an overnight shift.

I had been trying the door to General Manager JE's office for weeks, figuring that one of these days, he'd forget to lock it. I was right. I went in and, lucky again, he didn't lock the drawer that held the personnel files. I flipped through the files. I noticed that a lot of them were pretty thick as they had numerous memos put into each one. I found mine. It wasn't thick. When I opened it up, I only found two items in there: my original application and the handbook sheet that I had signed.

I was very disappointed. I actually wanted confirmation that my paranoia was justified. I was expecting memos that said stuff like, "Fayd makes us sound bad. I'm not giving him any good shifts," or "Jid keep getting on my case about Fayd," or "I'm going to make life miserable for Fayd so he'll quit!" But I don't know what I would have done with that knowledge. I couldn't dispute anything that Crad put in the file because I wasn't supposed to have seen it, and if I made an appointment to see the file and any document was missing, I couldn't discuss how I knew it was gone.

If looking up my personnel file flirted with being unethical, what I did next turned into a physical relationship: I looked at EVERYBODY's files. One of the things that came apparent when Jid took over was that he wanted everything communicated via memorandums. Staff members took to writing their frustrations in triplicate and it all got saved in the personnel files pretty much how people will troll and flame on the Internet now. I saw that there was an apparent memo war going on between Crad and the sales staff. I guess he went to one of the salespeople and insulted his ad copy to his face. This prompted a written response from the Sales Manager and it went back and forth. This was also how I found out that Snid got in trouble for talking on the phone during his shift.

I also saw notices of resignation by several employees, mostly the sales staff. None of them had anyhing nice to say about their experience in trying to make a living selling something that practically doesn't exist.

A year later, we moved the station to another location next to the KMCC-TV station. For some reason, JE didn't keep the personnel file in his office. (There probably wasn't room. He had a HUGE office at the old location.) The file was kept in the reception area and WAS NOT locked. One night, I pointed out the personnel file to Tod and Siz. Unbeknownst to me, Ked, who was the Program Director at the time, was there at the station while this was going on. He said, "Be, careful. You guys shouldn't be doing that." (I'll get to my issues with Ked in tomorrow's post.)

The next week, Ked held a meeting with the air staff. For the first time ever, JE sat in on the meeting. I knew why he was there. Ked continued with the meeting. When he finished, JE asked me, "Fayd, you haven't been going through the personnel file, have you?" The way he asked that question made it easy for me to lie. I said, "No, I haven't." Then Ked asked, "Are you sure?" I said, "Yes, I'm sure." JE said, "Okay," and then left. (I should point out that he did not question Tod and Siz, who had also gone through the file.)

I'm certain that if I had admitted to it, I would have been fired right on the spot. I think Ked and JE were counting on my honest nature to give them an excuse to get rid of me. It didn't work, but they likely knew I had just lied to their faces. I dodged a bullet.

A few years later, I was working as an Assistant Manager at the Mayan Theatre in Denver. One of the employees asked me what was in a cabinet we had in the office. I told him it was the personnel files. He asked if he could see his. I remembered all the hassles with KZZO and knew the right thing to do. I said, "Sure," reached in, grabbed his file and handed it right to him. The only stipulation was that he couldn't leave the office with it. He didn't have a problem with that.

And that's the way personnel file requests should be handled, period. I've never had any desire to see my personnel file for any other employer I've worked for. But that's because I never felt like any of them were conspiring to screw me over. At least one of them DID conspire, but they were a lot more clever about not making any indication that they were. That will be much later.

Worst Contest Ever!

When I started writing about KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM, I mentioned that we launched the station by giving away money, as much as $1,000 at a time. By doing this, we got EVERYONE'S attention and people were carrying around their pieces of paper with "The Zoo 108" written out 108 times in the hopes that somebody from our station would come up and ask them who they listen to on the radio.

While this was not the worst contest ever, I did have issues with it and I want to address those here before I move on to the actual contest to which the title alludes. I know that owner Jid wanted to make a big splash. I know that the $1,000 created prize a lot of excitement, but we would have been better off giving out $108 at a time instead. I know that made everyone go crazy over our station, but I'm pretty certain that everyone would have been practically as bonkers if we were handing a lower amount. I mean, if we were going to give away a total of $6,000 in that contest, we could have had 60 winners instead of six. Because the station never generated the ad sales momentum needed to sustain the contest, people started losing interest until we started giving away money again.

In the middle of one of our money giveaway droughts, we announced a new contest. It was the "$25,000 Bank Rip Off." According to the promos, one of our listeners was going to get a chance to win up to $25,000. Keep in mind, the promos said, "up to."

In order for one lucky listener to get to do that, they had to guess the identities of the "KZZO Superstars." We had the voices of four people that were played in extremely brief soundbites at the beginning of the contest. We would give the signal for listeners to call in, let them listen to the voices and try to figure out who they were. Over the course of the next few weeks, the soundbites got longer and longer until there was almost no way the average person couldn't figure out who they were.

Before we started the contest, we heavily promoted it for a couple of weeks. It really did build up a lot of excitement. We employees were thrilled at the prospect that we were going to be giving away money again, because we had been besieged with calls from listeners asking when they could expect another harvest from the "money tree." Even though we hadn't given any cash away in a long time, we continued to run promos saying that we were.

The four "Superstars" were George C. Scott, George Burns, Jane Fonda and Ed McMahon. The first version had the bites at less than a second each and there was this bizarre noise playing underneath them, so you really couldn't figure out who they were. I remember Dr. D calling one of his friends to record a prototype call so we could hear how the contest was supposed to be run live on the air. He played the voices and the person on the other end of the phone just started gasping. He was not expecting it to be that difficult. He made a few guesses, but he was nowhere close to identifying any of the voices. One of the things we were told was that if the caller asked if they could hear the voices again, we had to tell them no.

As it turned out, we only ran the "Superstars" part of the contest between 7am and 5pm Monday through Friday. This meant that I never got to do the contest during my shifts. After a couple of weeks, I noticed that the soundbites had indeed gotten longer and that callers were easily able to identify the first three voices. But that fourth voice, Ed McMahon, was the only one that never got a bite that was long enough for anyone to clearly hear. Because of this, Jid was able to completely control what day we would finally get our winner.

One weekend, we ran a promo that said that the soundbites were going to be much longer when we returned to the contest on Monday. I don't remember why, but I had to go to the station that day. When I arrived, Dr. D told me they had gotten the Bank Rip Off winner that morning. He played the tape for me. It was a woman who called in. The voices were played and the first three soundbites ran for at least 15 seconds each and without that bizarre noise in the background. When it got to Ed McMahon, it was one of his intros from "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson." It was a full production with the music and everything, leading up to "Heeeeeere's Johnny!"

There was a chance that the woman was going to say the fourth voice was Johnny Carson. Fortunately, she didn't do that. She got all four voices correct and was going to get to do the contest the next Saturday. We started promoting the heck out of the Bank Rip Off, making it clear that this woman was going to get to win up to $25,000.

The week before the contest, we got our paychecks. I went to the station's bank to cash it. They told me there wasn't enough money in the account for them to cash the check. This happened to be the bank where we were holding the Rip Off. I left empty-handed. On my way out, I saw the display promoting the contest that weekend. I got angry and drove to the station. Nobody there could help me with the money situation. It was bad because I didn't even have enough for gas to get back to Portales. Dr. D (who had apprently been able to cash his check) reached in his pocket and gave me a $5 bill. It helped.

I had to continue my rant on how angry I was that, here we are, we're going to let one of our listeners walk off with $25,000 and we didn't have enough to cover my $50 paycheck. Then Dr. D told me something shocking. He said that the winner would be lucky if they got more than $2,000. I didn't say anything at the time, but my first thought was that would be a terrible outcome. I mean, $2,000 is a lot of money and it's twice our largest prize, but it's rather piddly compared to $25,000. I was thinking that if the winner were to get at least $10,000, that would look really good. At the time, that amount was more than enough to buy a new car. But $2,000 would only make a decent down-payment. This was starting to look like Superfest all over again, and we barely survived the fallout from that.

Dr. D said the justification for the prize amount being so low was that if it came out to more than $3,000, it would have to be claimed as income on the winner's tax return. That didn't really fly with me, but I knew there was nothing I could do about it.

So the big day came. There were a hundred people gathered at the bank, waiting for what would be a pretty spectacular event. I got to go inside the vault. There was a table with 100 cloth bags that were filled with rolled coins. I was told that the way they would count the money the winner received was by a slip of paper in each bag that said how much was inside. Each bag had a different amount in it.

The winner arrived. She was a woman in her early 30's. She was married and had children. She had medium-length blonde hair and was fairly thin and pretty. She was excited about getting this opportunity to score some cash. In the days that preceded the Rip Off, the winner was told about the rules. The main one was that she had to carry the bags in her hands. She couldn't wear a skirt and try to carry the money that way. (That wouldn't have worked anyway, because the rolled coins would have ripped through anything that wasn't re-inforced leather.) She would have to start outside, run in the bank, into the vault and grab what she was able to carry. She would then have to run outside and put the bags on a table at the start point. After she put down the bags, she could run back inside as many times as possible within the 108 second time limit.

I overheard her husband telling someone that he had a dream about the Rip Off in which his wife ran inside the bank and it took a long while for her to come back out. When she did, she was wearing completely different clothes, like we had made her change her outfit after she grabbed the money.

I got to provide the device for the countdown. It was my digital watch. I set it for 108 seconds and started it. The woman ran inside the bank. She came back out carrying four bags, two in each hand. She put them down on the table and repeated this three more times. On the final trip, she slowed down the last few seconds for dramatic effect while we were counting them down.

About 15 minutes later, they added up the slips of paper that were in each bag. The total came to $2,610. JF excitedly exclaimed, "Wow! You got more than 10% of the total amount!" The winner, bless her heart, put on a good face for us, but I know she was disaapointed that she didn't get more. I remember her husband talking to one of the other employees. He asked if the bags with the most money were on the bottom of the pile. The answer he was given was "We don't know."

I hope you've realized this much: She grabbed 16 bags out of 100 that were in the vault. If the bags had equal amounts of $250 each, she would have gotten 16% of the total, not 10%. That math would have made it come out to $4,000. I don't know for a fact how the bags were set up, like if the larger amounts were on the bottom or scattered throughout, but it was pretty clear that the bags with the smaller amounts were all placed up on top. If you're the one who gets to run into the vault, you're likely not going to try to figure out alternate ways to get the bags in the middle and bottom off the table because you'll lose a lot of time doing that. You're just going to grab what you can get your hands on and run outside. I'm certain some of the other rules included not being able to knock the table over. This actually would have been a safety concern. Nevertheless, it was still used to make certain the winner got as little money as possible.

As far as I know, we did not control the gender of the winner (but I'm certain it was possible). If it had been a man who won, we probably would have been in a lot more trouble because someone in decent shape could have carried six or eight bags at a time. A man might have also been able to grab the bags at the bottom without overturning the table.

Our promos following the Rip Off made it seem like $2,610 was a big deal as it was the most money anyone had ever won from a radio station in the region. But I got a lot of phone calls from listeners griping that the winner did not get enough money. I agreed with them because I certainly remembered how I felt just a few days earlier when I couldn't cash my paycheck. The funny thing was that Jid the owner thought the promotion was a great success. I guess he never actually realized how much damage that contest did to the image of the station and the morale of the employees.

Another thing that the promos declared was, "We're going to do it again next year!" NOOOOOooooo... Actually, we never did the contest again and I was so thankful that we didn't. I never received any phone calls the next year asking if we were going to keep our promise to do the contest again. I guess that's how well-received it was.

In hindsight, it probably would have been better to have the top prize amount be closer to $5,000, so by comparison, the winner would have gotten more than half the money. But of course, that would have meant re-engineering the way the game was played and it would have been a lot more work figuring out how to keep the final winnings down to around $2,500. Actually, it doesn't matter because the way we played it was still rigged.

Years later, when I worked at the newsradio station in San Jose, we had a similar contest in which we asked listeners to figure out all the voices that we had jumbled together in a mashup. As the days went by, we separated the voices a little more until someone was capable of guessing all five. The winner got a trip to Mexico WITHOUT having to go through an obstacle course. That was a much better contest.

It was nice to not have to experience a contest that let everyone down.

Smoking at the Zoo

As you may have noticed from my past series of posts, I was treated like an outcast among the air staff at KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM. This was due to a number of reasons, mainly Program Director Crad badmouthing me to anyone and everyone he happened to talk to. Other reasons were that I was going to college to get a degree and, of course, the Asperger thing didn't help things much, either.

But one thing that really set me apart from everybody else was the fact that I didn't smoke cigarettes. I'm surprised that I didn't get lung cancer from those other DJs because they constantly smoked in the studio while they were on the air. AND they would smoke when they were hanging around after their shifts. AND some of the women who worked for us smoked as well. The tobacco industry could have kept afloat just on radio DJs across the country. Keep in mind that we didn't get paid very much, so it was always bewidering to me why the other DJs would shell out so much hard-earned cash to maintain this habit.

I wasn't really bothered by the smoke. I just didn't like how there would be piles of cigarette butts and ashes that were left behind by the previous DJ. Sometimes, they would remember to clean up when they were done, but most of the time, they'd forget. It wasn't uncommon for me to find their tobacco product remains hidden among the equipment and records.

I came in before my midnight shift once and bought a bottle of Coke out of the vending machine. I had mostly finished the soda before I started my show, but I had one swallow left in the bottle. I sat at the control board. The DJ before me stuck around a little bit to chat. I took that last swallow out of the bottle and GASP! I had this horrible taste in my mouth! The other DJ had flicked his ashes in the bottle while I wasn't looking! He said he was sorry, but he didn't do anything to try to make the situation better, like buy me another Coke or something. I had to deal with that ashy taste in my mouth for the next three hours. YUCK!

There were a couple of DJs at KZZO who didn't smoke. Tod wasn't a smoker when he started working at the station. However, he was feeling a little fatigued during one shift and found that someone had left some cigarettes behind. He thought about how good a DJ Dr. D (who smoked) was and thought he'd give it a try that night. He said he felt a real kick and had a lot of energy during his shift. He was hooked! However, he admitted that despite months of smoking, he never felt that same kick again, except for the first thing in the morning.

I remember he was going out of his head one night because he needed a cigarette, but didn't have enough money to get a pack. I didn't have any money to loan him. One of the walls of the station has all the plaques, certificates and awards that have been presented to the station over the years. One of them was a "Our First Dollar" certificate with a real dollar bill in the frame. Tod was very tempted to smash that open and get the dollar out to use it.

Smoking caused other problems as well. When we were the first station in the region to get a CD player. We started noticing that it wouldn't work like it should all the time. It was determined that the equipment breathing in all that smoke was doing damage to it. We also had to clean the CDs every time before putting them in. Still, no one passed any edict forbidding smoking in the studio.

When I started working at KHOW-AM/KSYY-FM in Denver, I didn't notice that much smoking going on. Either everyone didn't need to smoke or there were rules that kept them from doing that in the studios. The same was mostly true when I started working at the newsradio station in San Jose. In fact, it took me five years to realize that the afternoon drive guy there was a smoker. He always went outside when the network news program was on. When I first started there, the top of the hour news took six minutes, but after a few years it got cut to four minutes. I don't think he was very happy with his smoke time getting reduced like that. There was a woman who worked part-time there who smoked. She said the reason she started smoking was so that she could develop a huskier voice that would sound better on the radio.

I'm glad I never gave into the temptation to smoke, and I'm also glad that I never felt the need to discriminate against those who do, even though it appears that most of them didn't return that favor.

The KZZO Super (Mud) Fest

In its first few months, KZZO strived to be the "Greatest Radio Station Ever" for the Clovis/Portales area. We were able to accomplish that with an exciting sound, air staff and giveaways of free money and other prizes. In the spring of 1985, the powers that be tried to get into the major event business. The few years before I started attending Eastern New Mexico University, they had an annual "Battle of the Bands" music festival with area rock bands. There were other activities, including a bikini contest. My freshman year in 1983, they got rid of the "Battle" part and just made it a "Spring Fest." My sophomore year, they didn't do it, period. Usually, the problem was that on the day of the festival, it was overcast and a bit rainy. It just wasn't very spring-like.

KZZO decided to pick up the slack and present its own spring music festival. It was called the "KZZO Superfest" and it was scheduled to take place at the Clovis Fairgrounds in the rodeo arena and run from 1pm to 5pm one Sunday afternoon. It included area bands, contests, prizes and a bikini competition with the winner getting a trip to Hawaii. We started with on-air teasers that mentioned that "something exciting" was coming to the area on a certain day. I had already been told about the Superfest, but was unaware that we were going to take an ambigious approach to it at the beginning. The first time I heard that promo, I had to think for a bit to figure out what they were talking about. I then remembered the small discussion surrounding the event.

Some months before, the ENMU Associated Students Activities Board was working on getting its next major concert in Portales. The ASAB was responsible for hiring entertainment for the students. This included the "Battle," "Spring Fest," touring comedians and other music and novelty acts. It also included big name music acts. The year before I started going there, they had managed to land their first sell-out show ever with Pat Benetar. That was the legacy of the Board's President at that time. The next President landed a sell-out show with the country group Alabama. These set a bar that every following Board President would attempt to aspire to. The third President who served during my enrollment there was this real jerk I'll refer to as Gerd. He was hungry for his sell-out. He told the Board that he was in serious discussions to try to get Madonna to come to Portales. Under normal circumstances, whatever gets discussed at those board meetings is supposed to stay at those board meetings. But this was too much to keep as a secret. Word somehow leaked out and everybody on campus was buzzing about the possibility that Madonna was coming to town.

Of course, she didn't. This created a problem for us because when we first started teasing the event, a lot people thought it was going to be Madonna. THERE WAS NO WAY IT WAS GOING TO BE MADONNA! I mean, it's nice that people thought we had that kind of pull, but when we revealed what it was, it was a bit of a letdown.

Still, we pulled out all the stops to promote it as something that had never been seen in Clovis before. Those of us who were working at the station were really looking forward to it. We all felt like it was something that was just going to blow our competition away and just make everybody quit listening to them. A week before the event, we had a pretty intense meeting about what was going to happen. We were basically going to have to set up the stage and the sound system beforehand. Mind you, this was all mandatory voluntary, which meant we weren't going to get paid for it. Program Director Crad also told us that we were going to be out there introducing the bands and we needed to give the station a good image. We would not be allowed to wear T-shirts. I must have been on spring break the week before the Superfest because I told my Mom I needed a new shirt. We went out shopping and she bought me a new polo shirt.

I drove up to Clovis from Artesia to start my shift at midnight. The plan was for me to work the shift, sleep on the couch in Crad's office until it was time to go to the fairgrounds and completely be a part of the show. I knew I was going to enjoy myself. The only bad thing was that it rained all the way up. I hoped it wasn't going to rain the next day, which would have caused us to have to cancel. (I didn't want this to be a pattern. A few months earlier, we had canceled a touch football game in which we would be competing against a team from the KMCC station. Dr. D had told me about it a few days before and asked if I would be a part of it. I did express interest and he said he would say something to have a T-shirt printed up for me. On my way to to take part in the game, it was raining and Deed, who was on the air at the time, announced that the game was canceled. On top of that, they didn't print me up a special T-shirt like Dr. D said. "We didn't know you were coming." "I told Dr. D I was going to be here!" That still stings to this day because all the other part-timers got T-shirts.)

But the forecast called for a sunny day that Sunday. They weren't going to cancel. (In fact, it wound up getting so hot, a lot of people got sunburned.) However, I had arrived for my midnight shift and found out that Crad had scheduled me to also work Sunday afternoon from 12pm to 6pm. That meant I wasn't going to get to take part in the Superfest. While it was going to be nice to get a bigger paycheck because of this, I really didn't like being left out of the action again and felt like I was specifically targeted to not be part of the fun.

If you're familiar with rodeo arenas, you're aware they're mostly comprised of dirt. Dirt turns to mud when there's a lot of rain and there was a lot of dirt at that arena. So much that when the KZZO staff arrived, they couldn't set up the stage without first going out and getting a bunch of planks to place on top of the mud to get to the stage. Setting up our audio equipment was supposed to take 15 minutes, but it took two hours. On top of that, the bands had to transport their equipment the same way.

Sunday afternoons on KZZO were spent playing several hours of syndicated programming. While I was running the programs, I would get phone calls from the staff who were there, including Crad and the J Team. I had to keep putting them live on the air as they explained the delays in getting the Superfest under way. They were putting a postive spin on the situation and talked about some guy who drove his four-wheel drive into the arena and spun around a couple of times. At about 3pm, they made it sound like they had finally started getting the bands to play. I went on the air during breaks and kept promoting the Superfest, that things were finally happening out there and that everyone was having a good time. At 4pm, Crad called to be put on the air. I asked what was going on. He said, "We're about to get started!" WHAT? Three hours late? And it was going to get dark in a couple of hours?

The rest of my shift was spent fielding phone calls from people angry about the Superfest. The station produced promos after the event that made it seem like a positive experience. In the end, I was glad I didn't have to be a part of that fiasco.

But that didn't keep me from being a part of other fiascos, like the one I'll go into detail about Tuesday.

Does KZZO know it's Christmas?

1984 was the first Christmas we had at KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM. We marked the occasion with a "12 Days of Christmas" contest and a lot of advertisers had Christmas-related themes in their commercials. We even did a Christmas promo in which all the employees, including air staff, salespeople and reception, spoke their names. (Yes, I got to be a part of that, but for some reason, my voice was the only one that didn't get played in both stereo outputs AND NO ONE EVEN ATTEMPTED TO FIX THAT OR ASK ME TO DO IT AGAIN!)

The one thing we didn't have was Christmas music. We didn't play any standards or songs by well-known artists or even "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer." As I found out later when I was Music Director, getting Jid to agree to play Christmas music was a lot like pulling teeth. Crad the Program Director was probably too afraid to even bring up the subject.

This was the year that Bob Geldof got some British music artists together to form Band Aid and record the song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" It was receiving a lot of play on MTV and even though it was making headway on the "Radio and Records" chart, Jid still refused to play it.

The Saturday night before Christmas, I had started my usual midnight shift when I received a phone call. It was some girl requesting "Do They Know It's Christmas?" I told her I wasn't going to be able to play it. She said we should play it because it was for a good cause. I told her I agreed, but I couldn't play it. A few minutes later, I got another call. It was some person with a Hispanic accent. He also requested "Do They Know It's Christmas?" I told him I couldn't play the song, but I had gotten a previous request for it. A few minutes later, another person called. This one had a drawl. He also requested the same song. I told him I couldn't play the record, but had gotten other phone calls about it.

As expected, I got another call about five minutes later. The person started, "I'd like to request that song 'Do They Know..." and I interrupted him. "THAT'S IT! QUIT USING THESE PRESSURE GROUP TACTICS BECAUSE I'M NOT GOING TO PLAY THAT SONG! I WORK THE WEEKEND OVERNIGHT SHIFT! I AM THE LOWEST MAN ON THE TOTEM POLE AROUND HERE AND I CANNOT GET THAT ON THE AIR! QUIT CALLING!" The person who called hung up and I never got a call the rest of the night.

The next day (which was December 23rd), I saw Crad. I told him we had gotten some requests for the song. He said, "Yeah, I guess we should start playing some Christmas music around here." It was one of the few times he took me seriously about something.

I guess they played some Christmas music the next day, including "Do They Know It's Christmas?" A couple of weeks later, I saw a letter from a listener on Crad's desk. It was from some girl and she chastised the station for not giving the song more airplay. She said it was for a good cause and KZZO should have done more to promote the song and its efforts to feed hungry children. I remember one line in the letter saying something like, "Rock and roll is going to save the world." I assumed this letter was written by the same girl who had spearheaded the pressure group tactic before Christmas.

A couple of years later, Tod received a letter from the same girl during the period that he was the Program Director. I don't remember what that letter said, but the two of them began a friendship. I don't think it ever turned into boyfriend/girlfriend, but he did go with her on a road trip to see a well-known comedian one weekend. He did this after he had started living with Daz. I know Daz didn't like it.

Even though I'd gotten to meet that girl, I never told her about the hassle she caused me in December of 1984. She probably doesn't even realize that I was the person she pulled that stunt on.

That's just how life goes sometimes.

Barely Tolerable Co-Worker: Snid

This post introduces a new category. The person I am writing about today could not be considered an enemy, as he never did anything to intentionally harm me. However, he did have a tendency to treat me in a patronizing manner, so I didn't really consider him a friend.

His name was Snid. He may have been about a year or so older than me. When I first started training at K108FM, he performed the afternoon drive time program. After we changed to KZZO, he started working the six to midnight shift. In the early months following, I know Snid got into major trouble because Jid the owner was at the station one night during his shift. Snid was on the phone the entire time he was on the air. Jid got very angry about that and Crad the Program Director had to get on his case big time.

In addition to being a radio DJ, he had his own mobile DJ business. This was back in the old days, when you needed a van to fit in all your turntables, amplifiers, lights and vinyl music library. He was booked every Friday and Saturday night.

The only bad thing about this was that he was usually scheduled to work on Sunday mornings after I had worked the midnight to six shift. Because he was up late doing the DJ thing the night before, he almost never showed up on time. I usually had to work at least an extra half hour (which I really didn't want to do). Once he came in and was really tired. He said, "I'll pay you $20 to stay on until 7:30." I said, "Deal!" (That was worth more than working five hours.) Then, he thought about it for a moment and said, "No, I'll work right now." I guess he figured he really couldn't afford that $20. Another time, he came in Sunday morning after the "Fall Back" time change, which meant I had already been on the air for seven hours. He showed up late that day as well. I yelled at him, "You had a whole extra hour last night to sleep! You don't have an excuse this time!"

I do know that General Manager JE yelled at me for putting extra time on my card. He said, "You only get paid for the time you're on the air, not the time you're hanging around after your shift!" I said, "I WAS on the air during that time. Snid came in late! He always comes in late! If he's writing on his time card that he shows up at 6am, then he's lying!" But of course, they couldn't really do anything about Snid's paycheck because he worked on a salary basis. Even after that, he still never came in on time. Why he didn't ask Crad to schedule him at 12pm on Sundays, I'll never know.

But that became a moot point a few months later. The owners of KTQM-FM, which was an automated station with programming run by the DJs on the KWKA-AM side, felt they could better compete with KZZO by hiring a complete air staff to replace the automation. The first thing they did was hire Snid away from us. Snid was seen as valuable by KTQM for one main reason: He had several relatives who owned busineses in Clovis. When he went over there, they also sent their advertising dollars over there. I remember in Jid's employee handbook, he mentioned that some members of the air staff may be asked to sign "non-compete" agreements, but I don't think anyone was asked to sign one. I don't think it was going to make a difference because Jid probably never liked Snid very much.

Even though Snid left the station, you'd still hear his voice on our airwaves. Some commercials by clients who advertised on more than one station were produced at KTQM and brought over to us. I guess I wasn't the only one who found Snid barely tolerable. Dr. D played one of his spots and came on afterward and said sarcastically, "That guy is so funny!"

One thing that happened after Snid left was that KZZO could finally start its own mobile DJ service, called the KZZO Mobile Music Machine. It was a way for the DJs to score some extra cash, which I don't think anyone ever reported to the IRS. (Yeah, DJs are all scofflaws.) While I was at a few MMM events, I never got paid. It was kind of irritating.

I saw Snid one last time in 1985. I had gotten fed up with dealing with Crad's nonsense and felt like, if I wanted to keep working in radio, I would need to start over at another station. As much as I didn't want to do it, I swallowed my pride and went over to KTQM to apply for a position. I knew one of the co-owners because he taught a class I took at ENMU. I was there when he was about to get off of his morning air shift. I had filled out the application and handed it to the receptionist. She said she would hand the application to the co-owner. While I was waiting, Snid saw me and came out. He said, "Hi, Fayd! How are you doing?" He had this kind of ill-intent grin on his face. After he left, the receptionist came back and told me that the co-owner would call me later if he was interested in interviewing me. This wouldn't have been a problem if Snid hadn't seen me, but I really felt like this was the lowest I could sink in terms of my career in radio. (It was possible to sink lower by trying to go to one of the other stations, but I never had to do that. Crad resigned and things got a whole lot better at KZZO.)

Many years passed before I decided to find out what Snid had been up to. By this time, I had gotten back into radio at a news station in San Jose. I quickly found him. He was working part-time at a station in Savannah, GA. He was on the weekend staff. When I looked at the station's website, all the main announcers all appeared to be in their 50s and 60s. Snid's photo wasn't very flattering. It looked like Snid (who would have been in his 40s at the time) was thinking, "How did I wind up here at a station with a bunch of old men?"

As it turned out, I found that Snid had been the Program Director at another station in Savannah before working at the one I found on the Internet. It looks like he decided to stop doing radio full time and start a home construction business there. One of the things I saw about him is that he claimed to have graduated from ENMU-Portales in 1986 with an Associate's degree. I got a little upset about this at first, because I graduated in 1986 and I never saw him on campus. I think what happened was that he had gotten his degree at the ENMU-Clovis campus, but by the time LinkedIn came around, that campus ceased to exist, so he probably wasn't able to choose it. I was about ready to go on Yelp! and accuse him of lying about his educational background, but by the time I was thinking about doing that, I couldn't find the reference to ENMU-Portales anymore.

Other information I found was that he had won five Addy Awards for commercial production and he had tried his hand at composing music, which he published on his MySpace page. He was supposedly a Program Director in several other markets, but I'm not able to track them down. He also did the morning program for one station for 15 years, but the math almost doesn't work out on that because I know I spent 16 years between radio jobs from 1989 - 2005. He would have had to be Program Director for a very short time at a couple of radio stations for that to happen. Certainly, it's possible.

That radio station where he works part-time changed its air staff photos several years ago. Snid got a better-looking picture posted on the page. However, according to the website, there have been NO changes to the air staff in the past several years, including the part-timers. That's almost unheard of in radio. So, they either haven't gotten around to updating the page or they actually managed to keep the same line-up intact for all this time.

Judging by his Facebook profile, he's married and has one young child. But I don't think his wife is the same woman I met a long time ago when I had to go to his house one time.

I'm actually glad to see that he's been able succeed at something outside of radio. But I also don't want to ever see him again.

Advertising at The Zoo

I gave a little information a couple of weeks ago about how important advertising is to a radio station. I felt like I had just barely scratched the surface about the situation surrounding KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM. One thing I didn't mention before is how difficult it is to sell radio advertising. I mean, you're basically selling something that doesn't exist. If you buy advertising in a magazine or newspaper, it remains there in one place for all eternity as long as someone keeps the publication. With Internet advertising, you can force someone doing a little browsing to see your ad by paying more money for this feature. If you buy television advertising, you can at least see how you are being presented on the screen, and if you're lucky, someone is recording the program you're slotted on and will see the ad at a later time.

With radio on the other hand, advertisements are vitually intangible. Someone has to be listening at the exact time your ad happens to be on the air AND they have to be paying attention to what's on the radio in order for it to have any kind of lasting impact. Yes, your salesperson can provide you with an audiotape or an mp3 of the finished product, but almost no one records radio and listens to it later. And if they do, they generally know how to blast through all the ads on fast-forward. (When you fast-forward TV shows, you at least glimpse the ads.)

In a large market, radio advertising can be very effective because of the amount of people who listen while driving in their cars every day. In very large cities, people tend to listen to the same radio station every day and if your ad comes on around the same time during rush hour, listeners will be more likely to hear it. After all, they can't get up and go to the refrigerator in the car when a commercial comes on. They also have a tendency to be listening for more than a half hour going to and leaving work.

In a small market, most people can get from one place to another in five to ten minutes. That doesn't leave a lot of room to make a lasting impression. In the Clovis/Portales area, there were probably a lot more people who had to drive from one town to the other on a daily basis, but the trip only takes about 20 minutes each way. That's still not a lot of time to get through to listeners, especially considering that about 75% of that time will be taken up by the music programming, which is why most people are listening to the radio in the first place.

The amount of time people spend listening to the radio was just a small part of why it was so hard to sell advertising at KZZO. The real issue was that in the Clovis/Portales area, there were 10 radio stations competing for the small amount of available advertising dollars, and that didn't include the two ENMU campus radio stations (although they actually did manage to sell some advertising on the AM station my junior year).

Jid had done some extensive research before buying K108FM. He found that the main FM pop music station, KTQM, was automated and run by a couple of owners who actually had homes in the station's backyard. He also found that the next most popular FM station, KCLV, played Country/Western music and was operated by the largest independent convenience store chain in New Mexico (Allsup's). KCLV didn't really need advertising because the profits from the chain kept them on the air. Jid did not consider these stations major competitors for the kind of programming he was going to launch. He thought it was the perfect market to base an empire.

There were a few things that the research didn't tell him. The area did not just include those people who lived in Clovis and Portales. There were dozens of farming communities in which the residents listened more to Country/Western. For the parts outside the range of our signal, they were still able to listen to KWKA-AM. Another thing he likely didn't know was that one of the owners of KTQM and KWKA was the President of the local Chamber of Commerce. This meant he had deep ties with the business community. Another was that the local business owners were concerned over each nickel and dime. Jid said that in trying to negotiate an advertising contract with a client, that person was excited that he was able to get the rate down an extra five cents per spot.

None of this would have been an issue if the first Arbitron ratings had come out to our advantage. That was another thing his research didn't tell him. He was aware that the rating periods for the smaller markets were infrequent. (In a large market, they run them every three months.) When that first faulty report came out, he remained optimistic: "Well, we'll do better next year." But he was then informed that Arbitron only did the ratings once every TWO years. He needed us to win the ratings so we could set the ad rates at a higher premium. This was important for national advertisers. They would always go to the highest-rated station first, pay whatever they're charging and consider ones with lower ad rates next. He was probably prepared to wait another year for a positive outcome on the report, but I don't think he counted on having to suffer through two years of uncertainty. (And for what it's worth, I never found out about the Arbitron ratings two years later, even though I was still there. I have a feeling they decided to wait an extra year before they did ratings again. By that time, we were already on our last legs.)

December was THE month for advertising sales. We easily made enough money that month to carry us for at least the first four months of the year. I remember my second December at the station in 1985. We were running a full load of ads 24 hours a day. It was exciting and it made the shifts go by a whole lot faster. We did so well that year, it probably carried us for six months. I know we didn't do quite as well for December of 1986, but we still had a pretty good season. We were expecting another big Christmas for 1987, but the sales chart showed that our final sales for December were worse than they were for November. WHAT?

So, what happened? We found out that KTQM/KWKA held a "sales seminar" a few months earlier. All the local businesses were invited to a free lunch. This "seminar" was actually a sales presentation by a company that sold jingles for commercial advertisements. They must have had a great pitch, because all these businesses, most of whom we had trouble just getting $100 orders from, slapped down $5,000 apiece to have jingles composed and recorded for them.

For those who may have a hard time grasping the concept of economics, this is a great example of how it works in the local economy. These businesses all had at least $5,000 each in their advertising budgets for the Christmas season. They would normally spend that money on the local radio and TV stations. If there were 20 businesses that bought the jingle packages, that meant that $100,000 worth of local money flowed out of the area. This was money that was supposed to support the local media. Without that money, staff can't get paid. The stations have to resort to borrowing money from the bank to cover paychecks until they produce more ad sales, which was now even more difficult to produce.

We theorized they they had put something in the food to make those companies a little more receptive to the presentation. On the bright side, those businesses had so little money left over for advertising, they weren't able to buy air time on KTQM, either. KTQM basically shot themselves in the foot by allowing the company to come into town and haul off with all the advertising money. I also have a feeling that the pitch included charts that showed how businesses who used their product got a rapid return of investment. The business owners were likely duped into thinking they would see their sales skyrocket and they would use those returns to buy more advertising at Christmastime. (Or not. They could just keep it for themselves.)

That aside, the key to selling advertising is the salesperson itself. It takes a special kind of person who can sell something that only exists in the moment. Some people are very good at it and make a lot of money from the commissions. It seemed like out of every ten people we hired for the sales staff at KZZO, only one would stay on after three months. In addition, new sales people would be told they would get fired if they were not able to close more after their first two months. This put a large amount of stress on them during their third month. And when you're stressed out like that, you're not going to perform well.

We had one new member who would go see potential clients and just stand there without saying anything. I don't know what made that person think they could make a living at sales. We had another woman who was actually doing pretty well, but it turned out she offered to have sex with the clients if they bought from her. She wasn't all that attractive, so it was surprising that anyone took her up on the offer.

As challenging as it is to sell advertising, it was probably even more difficult to collect on past due invoices, which was also the responsibility of the salespeople. One of the rules we had was that new advertisers had to pay upfront on their contracts. But after that, we would run the ads on credit. Once we've run the spots, that's it. They owe us money. But if they didn't pay us, there wasn't anything we could do, except not run ads for them anymore.

During one of our down months, I came in every day to the station. Every time I came in, the ENTIRE sales staff would be there sitting at their desks. If there was one thing I knew about ad sales, it was that everyone was supposed to be out hitting the streets to either drum up business or perform collections. I guess they were all waiting for people to return their calls. As a result, my paycheck bounced the next month. (And that wasn't the first time that happened.)

Years later, I started working for a newsradio station in San Jose. It was exciting to see such a large sales staff and that so many of them had been at their jobs for years. I remember one salesperson landed a $50,000 ad contract, but I guess that wasn't uncommon. At that station, I never had a paycheck bounce. But there was one thing that remained the same: Only one out of every ten new hires would continue on after the three-month probationary period. Even in a large market, radio advertising remains a tough sell.

One other thing I found out was that when the economy takes a turn for the worst, the first course of action for a lot of businesses is to curtail their advertising budgets, starting with radio. It's an obvious choice for saving money. However, it still takes them awhile to cut their TV, print and Internet ads because they think those have more impact and they're probably right. It just stinks to have radio be the first to go.

A Wrinkle in Time

I found out I can do a new trick.



I think I'll stick with paper towels.

Ring Zone #3: Siz

I first met Siz in the fall of 1985 after she had been hired to be our newscaster at KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM. She came in to train in the studio because she was also going to take on some DJ duties. She was a couple of years older than me. She was somewhat cute, had medium-length red hair and was a little overweight. But she had a very perky personality. She grew up in Florida and was married to someone who was stationed at the Cannon Air Force Base. She had gotten married fairly soon after high school.

She had come to our station from KTQM. I didn't really have that much contact with her at first because she worked Monday through Friday. There were a few times I saw her when she worked Saturday mornings at 6am as I was ending my shift.

One morning, Siz came to work and had a guest with her. It was her older sister, Jaz. I found myself oddly attracted to Jaz. I didn't know why, because she wasn't really very pretty and had nowhere near Siz' cute personality. (The term today would be "Butterface.") I got to know her better later that night when I went to some station function at a restaurant. We were alone and talked for a good period of time. However, Jaz was just visiting from Florida, so it wasn't like I could date her or anything.

Some time later, Siz would talk about Jaz and all her boyfriend problems. I know I kept thinking that she should get her to move out here and hook me up.

After a while, Siz stopped working at the station and did the TV news for the local ABC affiliate. She told me that she went to the scene of a murder in which the victim had been burned to death. She said that the detective she was speaking to pointed out the body. She saw the charred remains and threw up on the spot.

She came back to KZZO to be a DJ. This was after I had become full time and had graduated from college. She worked six to midnight and I came on after her. Very soon after she started working, she became pregnant. It would be her first child. Since I didn't have much human contact outside the station, I started looking forward to coming to work, spending time and talking with her. Yeah, it was a crush, but I knew I couldn't do a thing about it. All I could do was enjoy the time we spent together.

But that doesn't mean I had her all to myself. As it turned out, Tod had a similar crush on her. I would often come to the station before my shift and find Tod hanging around talking to her. I got really jealous, but I knew I couldn't let on what was happening inside my mind. Another time, I bought some blueberry muffins at the store and brought some to work to share with her. However, she spent the whole time talking to this guy on the phone who was interested in getting a job at the station. She was talking to him in the smae manner that she talked to me and Tod. I got so angry that I ate all the muffins myself. (We hired that guy. He wound up breaking format and he got fired. I was glad to see someone actually get the boot for that.)

Daz used to work with Siz at KTQM. Daz said that she was rather mean toward her. She said that right before a shift, something unsettling happened and the person working the KWKA side told her he would cover for her. She said Siz gave her a mouthful about taking the night off when she was supposed to work. Tod didn't believe her, but I was aware that almost everyone at KTQM had a tendency to start conflicts. Not only did they target competing radio stations, they would turn on each other from time to time.

Prior to giving birth, Siz took a leave of absence. She had a girl and never came back to the station. I called her a few times and we were supposed to meet for lunch once so I could meet her daughter, but she canceled at the last minute. About a year later, I was at the mall and I ran into her and her little girl. She was already walking. That was the last time I saw Siz.

Some time later, I was walking through the Walmart across the street from my apartment. I saw a familar face. It was Siz' sister Jaz. I said, "Hi, Jaz!" after she walked past me. She turned around and didn't recognize me at first. I had to refresh her memory. She said she was wondering who in the world knew her there in Clovis. We didn't have much of a conversation beyond that. I never saw her again, either.

Years have gone by and I was able to find Siz on Facebook. She stayed married to the same guy and had two more children. They're all grown up now. They currently live in Lusby, MD. But I have no idea what they do there.

I was also able to find Jaz. She lives in Fort Lauderdale, FL. It doesn't look like she ever got married or had children.

I have no interest in contacting either one.

Work Friend: Dr. D

I met Dr. D the first night I started training at the station when it was K108FM in the summer of 1984. I was coming in to train on the overnight shift and he was finishing up his six to midnight show. I thought he was about 25 years old at the time, but I later found out he was only a couple of years older than me. I also found out that he had dropped out of high school when the station he was working for at the time offered him a full time job.

Dr. D was that extraordinary talent. He had a great voice and was a real pro on the air. When the station turned into KZZO-FM, Jid moved him to the afternoon drive slot. In addition to being THE voice of our station, he was also THE face as he was considered very attractive by a number of women. When our TV commercial was re-edited, he was the only DJ on the staff to appear in it.

Dr. D was also a master at producing commercials. He could do things with analog reel-to-reel tape and splicing that some people can't even do with computers. AND he was really fast at production. All he had to do was announce the copy once, and it was perfect. He didn't have to do any re-takes. There was one period when we had to repair the studio and run our shows out of the production room. If something needed to be produced, he would play the music bed, read the copy live on the air, record it and it would be good to use the next time the spot came up. We all wished we had his abilities and we admired him so much.

In a little less than a year after the format change, Dr. D had managed to land a job at a station in Abilene, TX. Apparently, Jid had helped him get that job when he wanted to move into a larger market. A few months after that, Program Director Crad quit the station. At the time, we didn't have anybody else on the air staff that Jid felt was even capable of becoming the Program Director. A call was made to Dr. D to come back and take the job.

The first time I saw Dr. D after he returned to the station, he told me that he left for Abilene because they offered him twice as much as he was making here. He said when KZZO told him about the Program Director position, they offered twice as much as what he was making in Abilene. I guess Jid figured he was worth it.

Jid did something with Dr. D that he didn't do with Crad: He gave him full control of the music and programming. Dr. D made a lot of changes when he took over. He felt like he had received a real education about how to sound more like a large market station while he was in Abilene. He was also quicker to add new songs and he put some songs in Recurrents that we didn't play on our station the first time around. It was thrilling to see how much our sound was improving. I felt like we were finally getting on the right track after all the hassles with Crad.

However, that didn't last long. I don't know for a fact that this happened, but I think Jid came into town and REALLY didn't like what he heard. He probably yelled at Dr. D and told him he was reining him back in. Jid then likely went back to the old way of figuring out the weekly playlists, dictating his tastes to Dr. D.

Dr. D was very supportive and encouraging toward me, way more than Crad was capable of being. He was always telling me that I was sounding good. The day finally came that he hired a new part-timer, Ked. He scheduled Ked to work the Saturday night midnight to six shift and put me in the six to midnight slot. I felt like I was finally moving up at the station.

Then he posted the schedule for the next weekend. He put me back on the midnight slot. WHAT? I made a special trip from Portales to Clovis during the week to talk to him. I asked him why he shafted me back to midnight after he had been telling me that I had been doing a good job and sounding good. He couldn't look at me when he responded and he didn't really give me a straight answer. What I didn't know at the time and what he didn't tell me was that programming was being revamped. Our morning DJs, the J Team, were not going to be a team anymore. Dr. D was going to take JE's place. This meant that Dr. D was no longer going to be doing afternoon drive and he had hired Ked to be full-time in his old slot. I guess that was all a big secret that I wasn't privvy to.

There were brief periods during the summer of 1985 that I wasn't in school. When I drove up from Artesia to work shifts, he allowed me to stay at his house. He and his wife had a guest room that I was able to crash at after my shift. I almost never saw them when I came over. They were either sleeping or left the house while I was sleeping.

One time, he said I could come over, but when I went there, no one was home. I went around to the back of the house and found their garage was unlocked, so I let myself in. (Boy, I was not aware of boundaries back then.) When they returned he seemed a little surprised and irritated at first, but he didn't say anything. I told him I had to hope I had picked the right garage out of the duplex. He said, yeah, the person next door would have probably shot me if I broke in there. They probably started locking their garage after that.

When we moved the station to a new location in Clovis, Dr. D had a hand in designing our new studio. In Abilene, the DJs worked at a stand-up control board. Dr. D said that standing up would increase our energy level over the air and we would all sound better. However, someone brought in a stool for us to sit on during those times that we weren't announcing on the air. I always stood up when my mic was on, but everyone else just sat on the stool the whole time during their shifts.

Eventually, Dr. D found a better-paying job in Amarillo, TX. When he was leaving, I think he was a major influence in getting me on full-time. I have to be thankful for that. If not for him, I probably would have had to move back in with my parents after I graduated from college and drive up every weekend until I found gainful employment.

I would see Dr. D from time to time, but not always in Clovis. He did TV commercials for a car dealership in Amarillo. He looked like he was raking in the money. And he was never totally gone from our station. Once, the head of the Associated Students Activities Board at ENMU bought some airtime to promote a big concert they were holding. We produced the commercial, but they never liked any of the versions that we did. One of the salespeople had to drive to Amarillo (about 90 minutes away) and get Dr. D to produce the spot. He did it, did it fast and it was exactly what the client wanted.

A few years later, he worked at a station in Washington, DC and became the Program Director there right when they ranked #1 in the Arbitron ratings. Tod sent me a copy of the "Radio and Records" article that featured his photo. I was living in Denver at the time. I called and left a message and he returned my call. I congratulated him on his success. Tod said he never called him back. I never got to talk to him again.

I don't know how long that gig lasted and I don't know what radio stations he may have worked at after that except for a job in Orlando, FL. A few years ago, I located him and tried to e-mail him. He never e-mailed me back. However, we are now connected via LinkedIn. According to his profile, he now works as a voiceover talent in New York.

This means his career has had ups and downs, but probably a heck of a lot more ups than I've ever had.