Holiday Battle

in radio, it is a given that the airstaff will be working on weekends and holidays. As my friend Jeff pointed out earlier, sales Slugs are MILES away from the radio station on weekends and holidays!

It was Christmas eve, 1994 in Columbus, GA. I was the midday guy at WKCN (Kissin' 99.3). The business office was going to close at 3pm that day. It was about 1pm. The sales staff had disappeared like food from the station fridge. I already had a pile of last minute production to do before I went home. The studio faced the front desk, so I could see all of the people coming up the stairs to pick up their prizes.

We had the usual cheezy-assed Christmas tree in the lobby... The ornaments were just unknown stiffed CDs pushed onto the branches with the painted side in... I bet you have NEVER seen THAT! LOL! In true radio station "Cheap-o Stinge-o" fashion, the tree stand was missing parts, and the station management wouldn't go drop 3 bux on a new one... So when they put the tree up, they tightened the screws into the trunk, and because the little plastic stops were broken off, proceeded to split the base of the trunk with the stand.

So at just after 1:00 in the afternoon, a listener and her kid came into the lobby to pick up their prize. The kid was a little girl... about 7 years old. She started messing with the CDs on the tree. Next thing I knew, the tree fell over on her and CDs went everywhere. The PD jumped up, ran into the lobby, picked up the tree off of the girl and leaned it up against the wall. He came into the control room and said "When you get off the air, I want you to go to the hardware store and get a hack saw. I want you to cut the bottom off of the tree, stand it back up and secure it into the stand. then I want you to put the CDs back on them and make it look nice." Mind you that I got off the air at 3... The same time the business office was closing until AFTER the Christmas holiday...

This PD was new to the station, but I had known him for many years at another station in Ocala Florida. We were actually friends in Ocala. We used to go have lunch and hang out after hours... I used to ride with him over to his ex wife's house and sit in the parking lot with him and watched him cry and babble on aimlessly about her... But I didn't work FOR him in Ocala... i DID work FOR him in Columbus. Funny how a bit of authority changes folk...

So anyway... I was BOILING that he thought I was going to go out and buy a "Hack saw" with my own money (He wanted me to save the receipt so I would get reimbursed on the Twelfth of NEVER), come back and re-assemble the Christmas tree so that NOBODY would see it. My intern saw that I was pissed. He went and rigged the tree up and got it to stand up on it's own merits. He came in and told me that he had fixed the tree for me. I thanked him. I got off the air, did my 2 hours of production and left at 5.

During my 35 minute drive home, my pager started going off (596-9000-911-911-911) This happened about 4 times before I got home. (Of course, this was in the days BEFORE cell phones were on every belt in the country.) So I got home and called to take the biggest cussing and ass-climbing I had ever taken in the history of radio. (He was really good at climbing my ass... I guess he thought I wanted to be his bitch) He told me that if I didn't get back to the GD station RIGHT NOW, that I needed to bring my pager and drop it off because I would no longer be employed.

He was going to fire me over a CHRISTMAS TREE??? What a bastard!

So I got back into the car and seethed and festered all the way back to the radio station. I came stomping up the stairs to come face to face with him in the lobby. He was ALMOST as pissed as I was. He gave me the eye and told me to fix the damned tree and NEVER to disobey his orders again. I slowly nodded and said. "Okay... I will fix your tree..." I picked the tree up and lofted it down the stairs. I stomped back down the stairs, ripping the decorations off of the handrails and stomping the tree on every step. He was at the top of the stairs looking over at me screaming at me that I was fired and that I would never work in radio again. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, he shouted "Hey ass-hole, you still have our pager. you need to turn it in NOW!" I took it off of my belt and threw it back up the stairs. It hit the wall at the end of the stairs and broke... Such a shame!

35 minutes later, I got home. I got out of the car to hear my phone ringing inside. It was him wanting to "Apologize"... It seems that he didn't have anyone to go on the air the next day.

Shortly, everyone at the station saw that he was a loser... even the listeners had names for him... One listener called him "Kris VanSpankleberry"... Then everyone on staff (Sales slugs included) were calling him "VanSpankleberry"... Needless to say, he didn't last long at that station. I had moved on to the station across the street and many others were gone by then too... It's a shame because we had the BEST staff I have EVER worked with! The market LOVED our station and we had FUN on AND OFF of the air. It wasn't really a job. It was fun to go to work.

I heard that VanSpankleberry landed in Myrtle Beach at a station called "The Weasel"... How fitting!