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.
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