Interesting Radio Depatures

[Dib9@aol.com]

My three radio firings were all pretty uninteresting.  When I was fired from 
my job as morning show producer at WGAN in 1993 and when I was fired from the 
afternoon news position at WKCG in 1994, both positions were being eliminated 
as part of economic cut backs.  In both cases my supervisors handled it as 
well as they could, but losing two jobs in six months was enough to convince 
me that I should find a job outside of radio.  That's what I did and I 
haven't worked full time in radio since.  

Brain Phoenix woke me up with a phone call at 7:30 AM and fired me from my 
weekend job at WCLZ in 1997 over the phone which I thought was not a very 
professional way to handle it.  (Here's an idea for a subject: bad bosses.  
It would be interesting but someone would probably get sued.)

When I resigned from WIDE in 1988, they apparently didn't like the tone of my 
resignation letter.  When I tuned into the station on my way in Chuck Igo was 
on the air and he said the midday guy would be doing afternoons that day, 
which was my shift.  I picked up my belongings at the station (they actually 
wrote me my last check that day and paid me through the end of the week) and 
stopped in at WPOR where I was doing a weekend shift at the time to tell Tom 
Hennessey that I would be available to do any shifts he needed filled.  Tom 
said he was really busy that day so I could do his shift.  I found it 
humorous that I left my home that day thinking that I would be doing 
afternoon drive at one station and ended up doing afternoon drive at a 
different station that same day.  The story has a happy ending as just three 
weeks later I got the afternoon job at WCLZ making $50 per week more than I 
was making at WIDE.

Most of my departures from radio stations have been entirely voluntary and I 
have made a habit of breaking format at the end of my last shift and playing 
Jimmy Buffett's "Why Don't We Get Drunk" (and screw).  I know it's 
unprofessional but I've done it several times going back to WAYU in 1986 so 
it's become sort of a tradition.  I continued the tradition when ended my 
last show at WMGX with Buffett last weekend.

Dan Billings
Bowdoinham, Maine
Former Radio Guy, enjoying my first weekend off in a long time

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