Riding the Radio Waves

I was a boss once. I fired someone once. He threw an Egg McMuffin at me. He aimed for the head, but I was quick. I ducked.

The muffin caromed off the stainless steel counter and landed on the condiments bar behind a long line of bleary-eyed, coffee craving customers. I’m willing to bet each one of them started their day with a better feeling about their employment situation.

After working for The Clown through college, I found myself working for The Man in the wonderful world of broadcasting. I was a disc jockey at a Top 40 station. I loved my job. The Man paid me to play pop music and talk on the telephone for four hours every night. And then there were the perks: free concert tickets, free CDs, free movie tickets. The list goes on, but, of course, there’s a catch. In the radio industry, there’s a saying, “You haven’t worked in radio until you’ve been fi red.” It holds a lot of truth. Radio personalities get fi red a lot, and most of the time for no better reason than your new boss owes a favor to someone. I call it Baptism by Fired. My baptism was at the hands of a program director with a major cocaine problem and a pathological need to see women cry. He looked like Yosemite Sam.

At our station, for reasons I never understood, there was a shower in the men’s restroom. On one occasion, our boss walked into my air studio wearing a towel. Damp, and mostly naked, he asked to borrow my comb. If Jodie Foster could borrow that image from my head to play a scene of pants-wetting terror, or psychological breakdown, she would add another Oscar to her mantle.

Radio stations usually operate under a casual atmosphere. Jeans and a t-shirt are the company uniform, and with good reason—nothing looks sillier than a big set of headphones on a person wearing a suit. The boss took casual to a new level, however. He wore sweatpants almost every day—the SAME sweatpants almost every day. It was also apparent that his intimate apparel option was neither boxers nor briefs. It’s difficult to take creative direction from someone who appears to be smuggling an angry ferret. You prayed he would remain seated at his desk during meetings, but this was a feat he rarely accomplished. Did I mention the major cocaine problem?

For all his bad behavior, lack of manners and poor sartorial choices, he was not an entirely unlikable person. He had a way of making you feel 10 feet tall when you did a good break on the air. He would come in to the studio and dance and applaud. He would tell you how big a star you would be someday, how you would go on to work in a major market while he would remain in Nowhereville telling everyone he knew you when. There was an odd charm to the man, though it felt rooted in pity.

He had an extremely sick marriage, the highlights of which staffers were regularly subjected to in Monday morning meetings. His wife wore the pants. Right in front of us, she would refer to him as Pooh Bear, without an ounce of levity or affection. It was more like, “Pooh Bear, your mother’s test results are back and it IS cancer.” Who wouldn’t feel for the guy just a little?

I’m pretty sure he didn’t plan on actually fi ring me that day. He probably figured I would cry and beg for my job; quench his twisted thirst for lady tears. But I didn’t. I just sort of shrugged my shoulders and said “umm…okay.” I was fired by a man wearing dirty sweatpants and no underwear; I should’ve had more to say, but I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I was devastated, but I was also determined to hold a finger in the dike of sobs until I was safely behind the wheel of my Geo Metro and clear of the station’s parking lot. Pooh Bear would not enjoy the satisfaction of feasting on my sorrow.

Weeks later he was fi red by the company. He picked up a new job quickly, and in a much larger market. A few months passed. I returned to work at the station, only this time in a better position. Pooh Bear called to congratulate me, and then he asked me to come work for him at his new station in that much larger market. I thanked him for the congratulatory phone call and politely declined his offer of employment. As I hung up the phone, I thought about that guy I fired over the McMuffin incident. And for just a moment I wished, for his sake, that the muffin had hit its mark.

Gretchen Lancour is a San Francisco radio and television personality, freelance writer, and voice artist. She’s hosted music radio shows and reported news and traffic on several bay area radio stations. She’s also anchored an entertainment segment on CBS 5 television. She lives in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood with her husband and son. 

~Gretchen Lancour