It’s a Friday, and for many of you – especially Floridians – it’s been a tough week. Let’s end it on a lighter, more whimsical note, shall we?
Mike Stern sent me this Bored Panda story about on-the-job “dark secrets.” Of course, it all got going on Reddit where this culture runs rampant.
In this time when many employees are reassessing their job situations, the work-life balance we’ve talked about on the job, and the tension between companies and their staffs, this is an appropriate topic.
So, what are some of the “secrets” you are willing to anonymously reveal – the things you’ve seen and heard happen during your time in the radio business. Of course, this has to be anonymous, so if you submit a comment or story, do NOT used your name or a legit email address. And please don’t name names.
To get things going, I’ve pulled a couple of “dark secrets” submitted to Reddit via Bored Panda.
Like this one from someone who’s a headset jockey working the phones for a big company
“In a call centre, we’re more likely to waive admin fees if you’re nice to us and we like you. Also we’re more likely to charge you (more) if you’re rude or patronising.”
How about this one from someone who works as a medical scientist?
“The pregnancy test that we run for your doctor that costs ridiculous amounts of money are the same tests you can buy at the grocery store.”
Or this revelation from someone working in tech support:
“I google most of your problems. Good tech support is very well worded google searches.”
And finally this one from an author:
“Many of the books you read – especially romance – aren’t written by the person whose name is on the cover. Most romance books are ghostwritten and bought by someone else (often a man, I’ve found) and published under a female’s name with a fake bio.
“How do I know this? I’m a ghostwriter.”
If you’ve worked in radio for a minute, you’ve probably got a satchel or two of these types of stories. Here’s the time to let them out – discreetly, of course.
OK, I’ll start:
I worked for a guy who decided to institute employee satisfaction surveys about the company, all anonymous, of course. Until I found out from someone else in corporate that a personality in one of the markets went off on a rant about this CEO and the company on the survey. Of course, it was easy to locate the identity of all commenters, and the boss was ready to fire the complaining jock. A couple of us had to patiently explain why taking out his wrath on this employee would be a bad idea, and probably illegal. That was the last employee satisfaction survey this company did.
Please use the comments section to tell your hair-raising radio story. Maybe we’ll collect enough to write a book. Or maybe just a few good laughs on a Friday.
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Fred was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2018.
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I used to steal CDs from the prize drawer and sell them at the local record store or on eBay to make my rent payments. One day I realized I was making almost as much doing that as I was working my hourly wage
Talk about true confessions. I suspect you’re not alone.
Haha! I used to frequent a used record store across from school. I think HALF the records they sold were stamped, “Promotional Copy – Not for Sale”!! I suspect Fred’s suspicions are correct. You are far from alone.
Heck, I TOLD my MD to sell excess CDs and keep the dough. His paycheck was an insult.
I was a receptionist and copywriter for a time and my GM talked with the other GM in our market with his door open. They essentially froze the announcer pay in our market. They each agreed at a cap on pay so announcers wouldn’t leave the stations for better money. It’s still going on today.
Ooh. Ugly.
I worked with a person (still employed in an executive position in radio) whose home payments, vacations, honeymoons, car payments, and even cell phones were paid for by record companies. The record reps (as we all know) talk both ways out of their mouths and would tell us on the staff. We’d keep our heads down and keep working and not even talk about it amongst one another–everyone was afraid someone would turn on them.
He seemed like the kindest and most wonderfully accommodating person–until you got to know him. Then the demon revealed itself. He’d tell you about his list of dates he planned to fire people in his desk (some dates years ahead), and he’d say the most horrendous things about staff and peers. It was dreadfully uncomfortable! You’d see him systematically get people who got ‘too close’ to his domain set up and fired. Once, I witnessed him buy everyone drinks and then stand in the corner taking pictures of a person he was ‘done with’ to send to the then corporate VP of Programming. Then, he’d build his narratives saying, “we have a problem with a staffer,” and make his case, which he did and eventually got the person fired–because staffers were starting to look at ‘that’ person as a future leader.
I’ve not spoken about it until right today. And yes, that person is still employed by the same company.
Glad you got it off your chest. I suspect your story is not an anomaly.
I agree. I also have so many stories like yours of dysfunctional managers and program directors who pushed drugs on me, threats of being fired if I didn’t sleep with them, harassed on the hotline. I still have those recordings of the lowlifes. It would surprise many to hear their voice saying those things. The business attracts narcissists and sociopaths
Thanks for sharing. We need more people to come forth with stories and if more people speak up, maybe there will finally be an audit of the radio business. There are a lot of people who’ve gotten away with toxic behavior for years and there’s been no industry-wide MeToo reckoning or any exposure of problems. They keep failing upwards and anyone who says anything is gaslighted, burned and punished. There’s another person who “seemed like the kindest and most wonderfully accommodating person–until you got to know him.” He would be friendly to people, get information from them as he pretended to care, then throw it back in their faces with insults, swearing, yelling and retribution because he was sadistic. And he’s still an executive. Watch out!
Former company billed clients for tens of thousands of dollars in spots during live sports that never ran, because the sales staff didn’t keep their clients spots up to date. How you ask? Well, due to a weird quirk in that particular automation system, spots scheduled during live sports wouldn’t show up in the daily log merge if they were expired.
The only way to know something was wrong was to actually listen to a live game and hear of the same client came up twice in a 2-minute local avail.
I also threw them under the OSHA, EOE, and Labor Department buses after they fired me. I had lots of screenshots and receipts saved. They got in a lot of expensive and publicly embarrassing trouble.
Ugly.
At my second on-air job, I was fired and asked to do my shift first. It was nights, so there weren’t a lot of people there when I left. We had carts with music on them lining the wall in shelves, and I took a bulk eraser to a couple of rows. I’m not proud of it, but I did it.
You could do a lot of damage – quickly – with those bulk erasers.
Similar story here but a happier ending.
The second station I worked for was a standalone FM which was about to be acquired by the powerhouse AM top-40 station in the market. In fact, I had been brought in mere months before the ownership change was scheduled to take place, because their night guy decided to take a gig in another market rather than take his chances on being able to stay after the consolidation.
The new owners decided to go beautiful music, and had to keep the existing staff until they finished building an extension to their building and physically move us. (I know … I wondered why they hadn’t started the construction earlier, given that we knew months in advance that the move was happening.) By the time the FM staff and our automation got to our new studios I had been promoted to afternoons from nights — including, strangely enough, reading the image liners in PM drive live assist, rather than just have me cart them — and was also the traffic director, because “mom” of the mom-and-pop former owners had done that before they sold it.
One of the things I did before going home in the evening was pre-record three “news updates” to play at the TOH until the morning guy came in. Well, they eventually decided the AM jocks could change the tapes on the automation, the liners could come from the syndicator’s announcers on cart (duh!) and AM traffic could write the FM log and program the breaks into the automation. And then they made the mistake of telling me I was doing my last shift before I recorded the overnight news.
So when I went down to the AM newsroom to pull wire copy for those updates, I instead pulled stories from the old Rolling Stone news service and recorded — in perfect “beautiful music” voice — updates about rock artists and the like. Which then played until the next morning.
It was a blessing in disguise, though, because another mom-and-pop in the market heard about my firing and hired me literally the next day for my first-ever PD gig. (The one I told you about before, Fred … they had a badly-done MOR which was a no-show in the Arbitrons, took it to A/C before that was actually a format, in 1978, and then saw us go to #5 in 12+ the first book, with no outside promotion.)
Maybe pulling that stunt created a little good karma for me.
You never know! Thanks, KM!
You know, this is a timely post. It’s been a challenging couple of weeks on this end, and I’m getting some much needed perspective. Thanks! 🙂
I worked with a general manager a long time ago who was “Mr. Trade Out”…but only for himself and his family. The rumor around town was that he never paid for meal the decades that he was in charge of that station. At least half of this mom and pop station’s program log were his personal trade outs…and the owner never knew. That is until the man’s second wife caught evidence of fraudulent billing practices. Unfortunately for him, his soon to be “ex” wife copied the records and sent them to the FCC. Oh yeah. The antenna for this FM station was actually turned AWAY from the market it was aiming to serve! Why? Years later, the now “new” owners of this station were told many thought the man was deliberately trying to “tank” the station so that he could get the owner to sell it to him at a cheap price.
Unbelievable, “Johnny,” but believable nonetheless.
2nd job in radio doing weekend overnights on a station that aired an hour long religious show at 6am Sundays, when I finished my show. The first time I attempted to cue it up on the reel to reel about 15 minutes after I began at Midnight, I couldn’t figure out how to thread the tape and so ended up turning the tape player off kicking it down the road til the end of my shift. Or at least I thought I had turned the reel to reel off. When my replacement showed up a little after 5am he asked “how long we’d been off the air”.
I had actually turned off the transmitter and done my entire show to no one.
Always monitor in “On Air” not “Program”.
I
And no one called? That might tell you about the size of their audience at 6am Sunday morning. Thanks, Brew.
It was my first job in a rated market. Most of the staff were easy enough to work with, but the owner came after us when our CHR station in the cluster beat his precious classic rock (no offense, Fred) station in the ratings. When the PD left, he promoted a yes-man to the postition. He was awful; didn’t last a year. I was told I’d be PD after he left because no one else wanted it.
The owner was a wrathful man, and could be heard in the halls actually saying “Who can I make miserable today?” I became a prime target. We were doing well in the ratings, but he flipped us to AC anyway. He told me often he didn’t like my voice, he made me run music adds by the sales manager, barred me from producing any spots, and eventually made me a glorified board op who generated music logs.
When I got a job in another town, this man (who once told us he was equal to God) pulled me into his office to tell me in no uncertain terms that I would have never have gotten the new job if it wasn’t for his recommendation. That was a lie; he never spoke to anyone at the other station.
Then, a couple of weeks after I left, he threatened to charge me with theft and fraud when some prizes went missing. (Turned out to be a salesperson who stole it.)
It was the worst time I’ve ever had in 36 years of radio.
Sad story, “Bud.” You reminded me of one of mine. We signed on a Classic Rock station (still on the air in format) in a cluster with the dominant Country station in the market. We beat them in the coveted 25-54 adults demo in our third book, at which point the PD and I were dragged into a meeting and told we were doing too well, and that sales was devastated by the Country station dropping to #2. In essence, it was strongly suggested we should do less well (huh?), and of course, resources were systematically stripped. They got their wish. THANKS FOR REMINDING ME! 🙁
Sorry for the bad memories, but at least we know we’re not the only ones, eh? 🙂
This is an absolutely true story and I will use my real name here because it is well known in these parts. When the management of Group One Broadcasting decided to make its Dayton FM (then called) WONE-FM to live Top 40, PD (the late) Bill Struck once told me their charge was, “Cut into WING’s audience…but don’t do too well. We don’t want a situation where the FM overtakes the AM.” That type of situation DID happen in town with WAVI-AM and WDAO-FM. Group One had just recently flipped WONE-AM to Country and didn’t want the FM to “do too well”. Well, the FM now renamed WTUE-FM DID do well for a few years…they took WING’s teen audience away and did well in young adults. But, the “dry spell” in that format in the mid-70’s led to a format change to AOR in the summer of 1975. And WTUE is Classic Rock still.
Agree. Going through it especially as a newbie can feel very isolating no one talks about the darkness
For someone with detailed knowledge of future start dates in an automation system, it is very easy to plant an “exploding cigar” in a cart, to launch long after said person had taken a new job elsewhere. So on the one-year anniversary of someone’s departure, the TOH ID mysteriously changes from calls and COL to “Wxxx, The Station That Sucks Fish”.
Won’t they be surprised next March at my former job…
I planted a bomb like this in the EAS test announcement.
After a dozen or so plays it played a snippet of Beck’s “Loser”… which the owner HATED.
I was dating a woman who would become my first wife. I was on the air overnight and she was unable to hear me 30 miles away on my paltry 250 watt signal. So every morning at three, I would up the power to 1,000 watts, leave it there for fifteen minutes or so. Oh! She could hear me then, telling me the radio would almost jump off the nightstand!
I had to lock up the razor blades to read a few of these so I’ll give something a little lighter in tone.
The GM of a competitor in the marketplace was a crazy prankster who would slam other stations on air and send them funeral wreaths when they changed format. To the Local “Continuous Hits” station, he sent Pepto-Bismal to help with their “Continuous (rhymes with hits)”.
I had worked for him in the past so I knew his modus operandi and that the Pink Cadillac he used for promotions was his prized procession.
To prank him, a coworker and I placed an ad in the local newspaper’s classified section selling the Pink Cadillac and giving the number to call as his studio hotline line.
The way I hear it, he went nuts when he got a call from the station jock on Sunday morning (yes, this was when jocks did shifts on Sunday mornings) saying he was getting a ton of calls asking about how much for the vehicle, which we actively denigrated in the ad.
When he called up the paper to find out who placed it, it was in the name of his assistant and charged to him. He was able to pull it on Tuesday so it only ran two days. To this day, I kick myself for not starting it on Saturday so that it would have run three days as they couldn’t pull it over the weekend.
Ultimately, he probably liked it but I know it drove him crazy trying to figure out who got him.
The PD used to lock the “image” carts in his office. I used a spoon from the break room to unlock the door and bring them back out every nite on the overnight shift.
Gosh, I feel like a little paltry wannabe after reading the wild stories above. All I can confess to is…”Meter readings?”
Meter readings? HA! On my first night at the biggest Top 40 in town I had to take readings. It was a 3 tower directional array and I had no idea what I was doing. (3rd phone, tight board, no brains) – and as I was moving up the remote control to look for what should have been the right readings, the station signal went “poof”! Down for the count. First night. Nervous already, but jeez, knocking the station off the air wasn’t in the job description. Turns out it wasn’t me, it was a coincidental barn burning that melted the remote control phone lines-and knocked the station off the air. You can bet after that there were more “writings” than readings for awhile.
Let’s just say on an overnight Classic Rock weekend format, the songs were long and I got bored. It wasn’t too hard to find the minutes of each week’s management meeting, including the impending firing of the receptionist and that it would be an EOE issue. That midnight shift was a great education in the business. My nosiness may or may not have served me well. I even pre-learned about my own firing in a different place that way.
Oh sure I have management nightmare stories. But let’s not forget my own peerless ability to fuck up!
On overnights for a very major market station I spilled a Coke into the board. The monitors immediate died, though we WERE still on-air. I figured I was dead meat. So I went to the Engineering office, got some tools, took the board apart and dried it off and got the monitors working, and re-assembled it.
By the time the sugar ate the circuits I was long gone.
Things weren’t going to well between myself and the PD. I was working at a CHR station that also did country on the weekends. It got to the point where he would ask others what time I was coming in, and if I was doing my work prior to going on-air (prep, voice overs etc.), but was twisting their words to make it sound like I wasn’t coming in or refusing to voice ads. Nothing was true, and I had evidence that I was there and doing what was required.
So he tried everything to get me to quit, including doing those country music shifts – he knew that was my weak point. But as a professional, you do your job as best you can.
In the end they teamed me up with another announcer, on my show and then made me redundant arguing they couldn’t afford to pay the both of us. Prior to this my show was rating highly, and in one survey reached number one. It was a kick in the teeth, but I had no regrets leaving and got a gig at another station in the same market.
It was my first “professional” gig out of college. I jocked afternoons, but also was part of a Noon news block.
Y’know how making the news guy laugh is a “thing” in radio? (And the best news guys never do.) Well I wasn’t ANY kind of news guy! And the more I laughed, the more uptight I got about laughing and ANYTHING would make me laugh (even just worrying about it).
Unfortunately, my part of the news block was national news. And the national news at the time was things like: “2347 American soldiers died in Vietnam last week.”
Horrible.
My best friend from adolescence and I started doing radio as a hobby. For about 3 years we had been doing programs on different radio stations without getting paid, just for the fun of it, but our dream was to get to work full time.
One day, early in 1978, a new station appeared on the dial. We liked it and we thought it would be amazing to work there.
After some research with friends we found out that the manager, who was also one of the owners, was the father of a former classmate of my friend.
He called her and asked her on a date with her father.
The next day, Donnie, my friend, went to talk to him. Donnie was born in Colombia to Scottish parents, and from a very early age he went to Scotland to study his elementary school at a boarding school, so his Spanish was not very good and he had a strong British accent.
Taking advantage of this situation, Donnie talked to the manager and told him that he had a lot of experience in radio, especially since he had supposedly worked at the BBC.
The manager believed him and, believe it or not, he made Donnie and me co-Program Directors for the station.
Long story short, our first paid radio job was Program Directors, all thanks to my friend’s lie.
And that was the big jump-start of my radio career…
I worked for an egotistical GM who thought he was bigger than the talent. When a consultant asked us “who’s the most beloved personality in the market” he replied “me.”
The consultant couldn’t believe it so he asked it a different way, again receiving the answer “ME!” 😂😅
Ever hear the one about the GM and Sales Manager who were married, but not to each other? I was leaving after my 7-Midnight shift and saw the two of them in the act in the front seat of her car. And they saw me. None of us ever spoke about that night, certainly not me for fear of being fired.
Then there’s the one about an AM/FM competitor that didn’t list the band or frequency on their invoices. The FM had great ratings, the AM didn’t, and they weren’t above running FM inventory on the AM when the FM was oversold, and not disclosing that fact.
How about the one where the sales manager and one of the cluster PDs were suddenly VERY friendly and spending a LOT of time together unbeknownst to his wife. This was in the early days of email and networked computers, and somehow the salacious emails the two of them were trading could be read on the computer in one of the air studios. I don’t think to this day either of them knows that every jock in the building knew WAY more of the happy couple’s “personal preferences” than they ever realized.
Bonus chapter—back in the early 80s we had a GM who fancied himself to be an audiophile. He’d send the Engineer to the transmitter site, then instruct him via phone to tweak the Optimod settings very very slightly. This process would go back and forth for an hour or two, til the GMs self proclaimed perfect ears were satisfied. The tub was that the engineer would take an instruction, then say “hold on” and put the phone down for 60-90 seconds, then pick it back up and say”ok, how’s that sound?”—-but in reality he never touched the settings. But the “genius” GM was convinced things were now adjusted to his specifications.
I was working in the Midwest at a small market station when an smaller town a few miles away had a HS basketball team that made it to a championship tourney. The sales team went to town and sold the tourney out only to realize that that time had already been sold to a group of sponsors in support of a local festival. Instead of cancelling the festival broadcast, I was asked to show up with the station van, play music, and act like I was on the air. I refused. This was one of many incidents inclusive of being mislead on insurance benefits. When the benefits were “upgraded”, I was called into a meeting with the business manager and sat through her excited presentation of how great the new benefits were (after I raised a stink for $6000 worth of medical bills). I declined the benefits. Finally the station owner’s wife’s one job was putting together the company Christmas party. She stopped me in the hallway a week before the event and asked about my RSVP. I gave her a kind thank you and told her I would not be attending the party. That Christmas I gave myself and family the gift of an exit from this radio station.
At a major market station – morning guy came in early one day because a storm had blown through the night before and he wanted to make sure the AP printer was up and running for his newscasts. He found the overnight guy sitting in the control room completely naked. “Well, you caught me” was his response. Apparently, he’d been putting on full album sides in the middle of the night, taking off all his clothes and exercising/working out in the nude. He received a written warning and the chair in the control room was immediately replaced. A few years later, the same guy sent polaroids of his genitals to three female coworkers via US mail. I was one of them, although not working at the station when the pictures showed up in my mailbox. He was fired a couple years later.
That’s one of MANY stories of inappropriate behavior I’ve seen in my almost 40 years working in this business.
Once, a long time ago, I cleaned the station in the overnights when Larry King was on. I found the GM’s typewriter ribbon, and I and the morning guy spent quite a bit of time deciphering it. That’s when we found out his master plans, it was evil. And he traded EVERYTHING for his home. Everything.
A bulk eraser??!! Typewriter ribbon??!! I read the story about the guy erasing two rows of tape cartridges with one and had a hoot.As for the typewriter ribbon story,I forgot you can do that.There was sure a lot of old technology 30 years ago in radio.
It does take you back to a different era!
Many years ago, our live overnight jock hypnotized a young, female board op and invited listeners to the station to take advantage of her compromised state. He is still in the business, and now hosts a popular conservative leaning talk station.