The Axe Falls On The FAN

I used to work at the FAN. Like I've said before, working in radio is one of the best jobs in the world, and I'm permanently depressed that the industry is dying.

Well, they're squeezing out other people, too. Clear Channel, the now-private radio conglomerate, swung its axe on about 1,500 nationwide. For the FAN's programming, they shitcanned two people: Chad Hartman and Darren Wolfson.

I worked with them in the past; they're good, honorable people. (Hell, today is "Doogie's" birthday.) So I'm taking this layoff hard. Having someone I know, even an acquaintance, lose his job takes me back to the day when I lost my job on the last working day of 2006. I hope they'll be able to land on their feet in radio. I'm still searching in the wilderness.

Clear Channel pulls this shit, but I was hoping they'd be different now that they are no longer a publicly-traded company. I remember I was in El Paso the summer of 2001. In March my board op job at the FAN was replaced by the Prophet, an automated console program. As part of my duties over the summer there I had to work with an all-sports, totally syndicated station there. One guy who showed me the ropes of how they do it got fired a week after I met him. Another person who programs the commercial breaks got fired over lunch, after a meeting I had with her that morning and before another meeting I planned to have with her later that afternoon. She tore up the papers that were in her hand when she was told to leave; they laid there in shreds when I came back. Her co-workers were running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It truly felt like they were traumatized. Can't companies plan to lay off people better and more humanely, or is scaring the shit out of the people who didn't lose their jobs their way of making them more productive? Or do they just want to be sadistic like that?

I need to find a new job now that my money's run out, but this shit I just can't take. I have to run back home and get into my bed, conk myself over the head with a dictionary and hope I never wake up. This world is too fucking scary. Too unfair and too fucking scary.

Oh yeah, I couldn't sleep last night because of my situation, so this morning I decided to do something about my morningwood and touch myself. Very little came out. Again.