fired past i think i lost two people their jobs. they were negligent, and almost dangerously slow. someone was almost seriously injured and they laughed at me. i was angry, i was afraid. i still am. i also feel a bit of shame, though i stand by my decision to report the names and events (warts and all, including some of my own actions) to the powers that be. i think they'll be fired next week. it was to serious to let slide. i'm still angry. i'm still afraid for what almost was. why did they laugh instead of help? what the fuck? 130323 ... past The worst hangovers are the moral ones, as I think I've written here before. I still stand by my decision, but it still hurts to think of, a kick in the gut. 130324 ... tender square in the meeting i took with vince cannova to discuss my demo, he wavered, saying, “i’m just not sure if you’re a good fit for this station,” and i didn’t know if i was supposed to take that as a compliment or an insult. looking back on my time post-firing, i’m inclined to believe it was the latter. growing up, i listened to 89x incessantly; i slept with my radio tuned to the station and the songs on heavy rotation became the soundtrack of my dreams. they introduced acts like pj harvey, tori amos, fiona apple, veruca salt and elastica into the detroit commercial radio sphere. cristina, the host of “time warp,” a weekend show that played alternative classics from the 70s and 80s, was my favorite dj. she was so knowledgeable about music, always compiling and reporting the daily “new rock news,” and her voice had this silvery quality to it, so crisp but also a little scuffed. as a kid, i used to tape my favorite songs off the station and pretend i was on the air introducing them, sharing what i knew about all the artists i loved with my “listeners.” i’d gotten the call to submit a demo when adam, my boss at cjam-fm, had turned down vince’s job offer to become music director. i was stunned that adam had passed along my name for consideration. “why wouldn’t i?” he said. “you have the best delivery of anyone here, hands down.” the station started me off working the weekday graveyard shift, but it wasn’t so bad. i’d prerecord my breaks in the afternoons and the automated system would trigger the recordings at the right times in the schedule when it aired. it used to take about 60 minutes to record for the six-hour slot, but as i got more adept with the equipment and more confident with my on-air personality, i could knock it out in 30 minutes. the pay wasn’t much but i could go to free concerts the station promoted any time i wanted, which was a major benefit. that year alone i saw bjork, muse, snow patrol, ok go, silversun pickups, and feist, hot hot heat, cold war kids, black rebel motorcycle club, and bright eyes all play live, acts that we didn't even play on the air. i also scooped many promos that had been passed up from matador and merge because the station wasn’t as cutting-edge with their new music selections as i’d known from my youth. after a couple months of being employed there, i submitted a proposal to bring “canadian x-ports” back to the airwaves, a one-hour show airing sunday nights that featured canadian content, and vince gave me the green light. producing and hosting that show was the best part about working at the station; i had the opportunity to bring back music i’d grown up hearing, old tracks from sloan and rusty, the inbreds and limblifter, and burgeoning indie acts such as broken social scene, metric, stars and the meligrove band. eventually, they expanded my responsibilities, and i was asked to do live broadcasts on weekend afternoons following cristina’s morning shifts (the woman i grew up idolizing). i couldn’t believe my luck. around the same time i was hired, the station took on a new music director that was in his early- to mid-twenties like i was, a graduate fresh from specs howard named jay hudson. he and i didn’t often see eye-to-eye on things. i’d attend weekly music review meetings to present new canadian acts that jay hud didn’t like, and vince would end up going with the safe, generic bands they had always played (theory of a deadman, simple plan, etc.). payola is alive and well and commercial radio; stations agree to a play the latest song from an act the label wants to promote, and in exchange the station will receive free tickets to the band’s show and cds to give to listeners, or the band will agree to headline the annual concert the station puts on. i entered the on-air studio during one of jay’s shifts once when he was raving about this new song that was playing and he asked me what i thought about it. i told him to his face, brazenly, that i hated the music we played on the station and left the room with the promo binder i’d gone in to grab. as i worked more live weekend shifts, jay would coordinate with bands coming into detroit for live shows and have me interview them. the station was trying to expand their social media presence and hired an intern to film and photograph the sessions, uploading the content to youtube. during this period, i was approached by (a different) adam, a local rock musician, about doing an interview for a communications class he was in. he wanted to film me working at cjam as the program director and contrast that with my work at 89x as an on-air jock. i agreed but never ran the idea past the station for approval. when adam came to the studio to film me, he asked what it was like to work in commercial radio. i conceded that it was pretty easy; the computer did everything, the songs were programmed in advance and scheduled based on their rotation rating, all i had to do was turn on the mic and answer phones for giveaways and requests. he filmed me talking with a caller who wanted to hear some kings of leon—years before kings of leon were being played on the station there—and i told the caller i wished i could, lamenting, “we’re not a cool radio station, we’re a commercial radio station.” that quote ended up in adam’s short doc. when he showed me the edit, i wondered if it should be kept, but ultimately decided that i stood by the statement, it was a true representation of how i felt. adam mentioned that he was going to upload it to his own youtube channel to create a portfolio of his video work and i thanked him and didn’t think anything more of it. a few weeks later, i went to the station to record my graveyard shift and vince stopped me in the studio. “did you get my email?” he looked serious. “no, why? what’s going on?” “we just got word that the station is reducing its budget and we’re going to have to let you go. heidi is already filling in for the rest of your shifts; you can record x-ports over the next two weeks.” i was blindsided. i think i may have even cried in front of him, which made it worse. i had been holding various jobs since i was 9; i had never been fired from any of them. i got home and tried to figure out what the hell had changed. the only answer i could come up with was that jay (or someone else) had found adam’s video and brought it to vince’s attention. and then i got pissed that the station was letting me go without the full two-weeks pay for my scheduled shifts: at that time, i was prerecording graveyards from sunday to thursday, working live shifts on saturday and sunday afternoons, and producing and hosting x-ports on sunday nights. my final check would only contain the fee to produce x-ports. after that, i went to the union and demanded they get me the pay i was owed based on my seniority and they came through for me. then i decided, without telling management, that i would record one final episode of x-ports, instead of two, and leave. i penned a scathing critique of the station for my opening break of the final episode. i purposely put off prerecording it for as long as i could, completing the show for broadcast a couple of hours before it was scheduled to air. all weekend, jay kept texting me to ensure the episode was being recorded since vince was out of town. i assured him that it would be done in time. in the opening of the show, i told listeners that i was being let go because money was more important to the station than any kind of artistic integrity. i said something to the effect of, “to prepare you for the transition back to all the nickelback you’ll be hearing during this time in the weeks ahead, i’m going to kick things off with alanis morrisette doing a cover of black-eyed peas ‘my humps.’ enjoy!” jay was furious. he called the on-site station engineer and they cancelled all my remaining breaks for the show in an attempt to censor me, playing only the songs that had been scheduled for the broadcast. upper management went so ballistic the following day that they tried to get me fired from cjam. adam, my boss, politely told them that what i’d done had nothing to do with my work in campus radio and hung up the phone. in fall of 2020, 89X changed format for the first time in thirty years, trading in alternative for the fastest growing genre in the us—country. despite the memories i carried of the station growing up, i can’t say i was sorry to see it go. 210905 ... tender square ugh, i feel like i sound like such an ass in what i posted (which is not to say that view isn’t warranted! i was quite sassy in parts of what happened!). but this is yet another story that i’ve been trying to tell for so long, and i ended up compressing a lot of details here, details that i think may need to be incorporated into an updated version i’m working with. some things i missed that may or may not be important to the context of the story: - when i was hired at 89x, i received zero training. i had never held a job before that point that didn’t require a review and sign-off of company policies. they threw me into the studio and it was sink or swim. also, i hadn’t been a regular listener for at least 5 years and felt like i’d be an idiot to pass up the opportunity to work there, given how much the station meant to me growing up. somehow, in taking the job i convinced myself that maybe i could help influence what was played on the air, that the station could be restored to its former glory (ooof). - at one point, i was invited to lunch with vince and phat matt, the program director of a different station in the building called the river (phat matt used to work for 89x). on the car ride over, phat matt said he had wished that the river had hired me first, and i wanted to tell him that i thought that station was a better fit for me given the artists they played but couldn’t. the lunch was so awkward! vince and matt talked to each other about work and i just sat there quietly wondering why they had invited me in the first place. - i enjoyed talking to vince when i ran into him at the station because we shared a love of a lot of the same artists. “i wish we could play these records here!” i’d tell him. after x-ports was brought back, i tried to convince him to create a new one-hour show where we could feature more indie acts but it never came to fruition. again, looking back i discovered how foolish this was. for one thing, before vince became the pd of 89x, he had worked as the music director there for many years—he was, in part, responsible for why their sound had veered so far from what it had been, so by criticizing that, i was criticizing him in the process. two, i see now that i was trying to bring some of cjam into 89x, and how much of a disaster that would have been; we had a policy at cjam that anything that was played on commercial airwaves could not be played on our station, as a way to ensure that we represented the alternative. if i had managed to get those indie acts on 89x, it would have taken away valuable content that was played by many volunteer dj’s at cjam. - when jay had asked me in the studio about whether i liked the song that was playing and i said i hated everything, i surprised myself with my candor. typically, i’m far more diplomatic in situations like that. i didn’t take any time after the incident to unpack why i had reacted that way. - i started behaving in other ways that were incongruent with how i usually conducted myself in the workplace and, looking back, i’ve wondered if i was trying to sabotage myself because the job did not align with who i was. for instance, because i could record my graveyard shifts any time after 2 pm, there were occasions that i went into the station after i’d been drinking. in the summer, i’d go to patio happy hours with friends following my cjam workday and try to pace myself. but there were quite a few times i biked to 89x tipsy and recorded my shifts. again, this was another situation that i didn’t examine at the time to figure out why i was acting that way. - after vince fired me, i emailed phat matt to see if there were any openings at the river. when he did not respond to my message, it dawned on me that something else was going on. at the time, i was angry that vince wasn’t up front with me as to why i was being canned—why lie about the budget? but years later, after having worked as a supervisor in a different corporate job where a third of the staff in our department got laid off, it finally clicked for me that companies are never direct about the circumstances surrounding a termination and will often fall back on the “shrinking budget” excuse. 210906 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Ne worriez pas, as we say in Quebec: you don't come across like a jerk at all, either in your actions or your reasons. Good on you for telling them off. As an aside, sometimes I feel like the popular/indie music distinction is a bit suspect, by basing things on some measure of mainstream success other than the literal definition of producing music independently or having an "independent" record label (and I'm not sure there's an exact definition of that anyway). But then I think: who are the people who first forced the distinction? Mostly the big players, right? So the "alternative" category grew up as, well, an alternative. And I grew up with a limited perspective on music categorization, despite developing eclectic tastes by chance or personality. When I was a teenager, I lumped all "popular" music together: popular was non-classical, the kind of stuff with guitars and maybe drums, right? So Fiona Apple and...uh, Maroon 5?...would be in the same category that way, for me. 210908 ... e_o_i Oh yeah, and I was fired once after a week and a day. Proofreading job, children's publishing house. I don't think it was anything I did - unless they didn't like that I_got_a_dadaist_haircut? They did say budget. My family's best guest: someone was on leave and they hired me knowing it could be temporary. I don't know. Maybe it WAS the haircut. This was March 2013, shortly after graduating, after the events loosely sketched in Centennial_Park. B. never completely fired me, just put me on and off admin work whenever it was convenient. To be fair, I'm stubborn and hard to deal with sometimes. But same with him, replacing "sometimes" with "often" - so it's a bit of a relief that I don't have time for that aspect of the business. It's unlikely I'll be fired from the tutoring part unless I screw up my-fault-fully. But I shouldn't tempt fate. Circumstances gonna circumstance. 210909 ... e_o_i Oh god of grammar, please don't banish me to typo hell: "My family's best guest"??? I meant "guess" but "guest" has its own weird logic. Hospitality to hypotheses, I say! 210910 what's it to you? who go blather from