[BC] Celebrating My Radio Anniversary..

[JYRussell at academicplanet.com]

Hey Paul -
  4 years.  hmm. That was about 16 years ago for me.  Went from overnights
to middays, and picked up most of the production (voice) for the stations,
plus eng. and a few dollars.   Radio is a weird world sometimes.

   There used to be an old saying about knowing how good you were in radio
by the size of your trailer. (Because of the folks moving from here to there
to chase jobs up from market to market. ) Folks would last a year or two at
some station,  then move for one reason or another.  Are you planning to
move around??  I know one or two that played that, and in the age of
computers, the jobs aren't paying all that much anymore, until you finally
get 'a big one'.
  Out of the same room in the same facility, I know one person on air making
15$ and hour, the other made 300$ per day.  The 300$ a day kid quit, she
'didn't like what they were doing to her'.

I vowed to myself to do it a different (the harder?) way...
I live here... so I worked here.

As a station, we pretty well locked out all the competition in our market
for many years, until we got the corporate buyout / LMA stuff, and a
horrible GM, who made enemies with nearly everyone within earshot.

I had payed off my home, bought a vehicle or two, earned a small retirement
sum.  Made it to about 2005 1/2 before the corporate mess finally moved me
to contract work.
Thats ok for micro small market, ain't it?  I got away from him, he went out
of business... now, now I'm doing the tech/eng, and some voice, I miss the
midday shifts... but at least I'm still in the game.

  I guess my next project will be to upgrade my board and soundcard at home,
and get an agent for that part of things, though  I don't like what they
charge -  if we can bill enough it will be worth it.  Unless I can latch
onto a good engineer and solid work with him, where I can grow that end of
things.

  In the meantime... think about all the signals we've sent out of the
atmosphere that are on their way to Jupiter or Pluto right about now...

Do you suppose anybody else will ever hear them??
They are out there, along with all the other voices from years well past...
and well in front of the voices yet to come...

Jason R.