Monday.\u00a0 April 6, 1987.<\/p>\n
I woke up.\u00a0 A restless, miserable weekend was over.\u00a0 It was time to get back to business – finding myself both a living for the short term, and my next talk radio job.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Preferably at the same time.<\/p>\n
On the plus side:\u00a0 I’d been through this before.\u00a0 I’d gotten whacked at radio jobs, starting when I was 17, at KQDJ in Jamestown.\u00a0 A couple of slickeeboys had bought KEYJ, changed the call letters, and tried to make it sound like a big-market middle-of-the-road station.\u00a0 Along the way, they fired a bunch of the locals, me included.\u00a0 I’d gotten diced four years later – at the same station, different reasons, same basic deal.<\/p>\n
And now, KSTP.\u00a0 I was getting used to one one of radio’s great truths; you never<\/i> quit a job on your own.<\/p>\n
Other pluses:\u00a0 when I heard that the firings were coming, I’d snagged an old copy of the “Standard Rate and Data Service” directory – the SRDS, or “Serds”, a telephone-book-thick listing of every radio station in the country by market, format, power, coverage and rough ad rate.\u00a0 The book was about 700 pages thick, I think, and covered literally every radio station in the US and its territories (as of November, 1986, anyway).\u00a0<\/p>\n
I took a highlighter and started going through the book, starting with the markets I wanted to take a shot at.\u00a0 I focused on finding talk stations in mid-sized markets – Madison, Columbus and the like – as well as suburbs of bigger markets (places like New Bedford MA, Santa Rosa CA and Aurora IL), the kind of place that used to hire 24-year-old kids for peanuts, put them on mid-days or evenings or wherever they felt a need for a solid, reliable local show – and let ’em get some experience.<\/p>\n
And of course, I marked down all the talk stations in big markets.\u00a0 While I figured I had a very long shot of getting an actual on-air job there, I’d certainly take another producer gig.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Any port in a storm.<\/p>\n
I took a legal pad and started my list; stations, markets, and program directors (where they were listed in the SRDS), all in pencil, since I knew the list would change.<\/p>\n
And at 9AM, I started cold-calling.\u00a0 And I stayed on it until lunchtime.<\/p>\n
After lunch, I spent a couple of hours cold-calling some of the Saint Paul and Minneapolis neighborhood newspapers.\u00a0 I’d done some writing for a few of them the previous year, trying to stretch my Hubbard paycheck.\u00a0 I’d be stretching even further, now.\u00a0 But I landed a little assignment – worth about $60 – that afternoon from one of the neighborhood papers, which was worth a little celebrating.<\/p>\n
And then, back to cold-calling radio stations.\u00a0 And, briefly, a shot of pay-dirt.\u00a0 The program director at WSME in New Bedford, Massachussetts was looking for someone – cheap – to do a mid-day show.\u00a0 He wanted my tape.<\/p>\n
I had a cassette and an envelope ready to go.\u00a0 I typed out a cover letter, ready to go out the next morning.<\/p>\n
I crossed my fingers.\u00a0 For tomorrow, I was going to call the headhunter for the job in Orlando.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One day of looking.\u00a0 Two solid leads.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My panic was starting to wane, just a little bit.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I think back on that day, today, and find it hard to distinguish from many other days like it – the first work day after a job goes in the tank.\u00a0 It’s happened many times in my life – never<\/i> actually for cause, of course; in Radio, one never needs cause to get fired.\u00a0 And when you’re a contractor in the software business (as I have been for most of the past 15 years), projects – and contractors’ jobs – are constantly getting shifted and un-funded and put on hold, which has left me out of work at some very <\/em>inconvenient times.\u00a0<\/p>\n So the drill you see above – hit the beach running at 8AM, start cold-calling and calling in markers and contacts and rigidly scheduling myself – is pretty much what I’ve done every <\/em>time I’ve found myself job-hunting unexpectedly.\u00a0 And the drill has served me well; it’s landed me in jobs very <\/em>quickly almost every time I’ve been out of work.\u00a0 And during the exceptions – the software biz recession\u00a0of 2003 being the big example, when I spent five months with no income at all – it’s provided a routine, a focus, a basis for the kind of self-discipline I’ve needed to get through.\u00a0<\/p>\n The tools – the internet, emailed resumes, job-search websites – have improved, and made job-hunting much, much easier.\u00a0 But the stresses I’ve faced – kids to feed, mortgage to pay – have more than kept pace.<\/p>\n One thing I don’t have today is the sense I had back then – that I’m trying to win back the love of my life.\u00a0 Which, in a way, doing talk-radio was, to me, back then; the first thing I’d ever really felt at home<\/em> doing.\u00a0 It’s nice not having that bit of baggage, anymore.<\/p>\n Back then, twenty years ago?\u00a0 Well, that was another story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Monday.\u00a0 April 6, 1987. I woke up.\u00a0 A restless, miserable weekend was over.\u00a0 It was time to get back to business – finding myself both a living for the short term, and my next talk radio job.\u00a0 Preferably at the same time. On the plus side:\u00a0 I’d been through this before.\u00a0 I’d gotten whacked at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}