Nurse the Hate: Crazy At Work

There is a 75% chance that whenever you make the mistake of asking someone how their job is going, they will respond by telling you that “work is crazy right now”.  It makes absolutely no difference what the field of employment is either.  Work is always “crazy”.  I saw a woman on social media refer to her day as “crazy” because the dog knocked over a bowl of cereal and the kids requested something different for their lunch at school.  It’s all relative I suppose.

I worked at a radio station some years ago. When I was employed there the following things happened within a shockingly brief period of time.  

1.      A new sales guy got hired in.  Part of the job responsibilities were to cold call businesses to solicit them to run ads on the shitty radio station.  Within the first two weeks of his hiring, word came back to management that he was selling pornography out of the trunk of his car.  For example, he would arrive at a car dealership and ask “Would you like to buy some ads on this crappy radio station?”.  The car dealer, being somewhat sensible, would say “no”.  Then the sales guy would make a radical switch pitch and somehow transition into asking if they would be interested in buying pornographic video cassettes from his trunk.  I’m sure he made more money from his porn sales than he did the advertising sales.  It was a brief run though.  Eventually someone called the station to complain.

2.     The new sales manager fired the salesman.  He then quickly hired a new salesman, a man with a synthetic looking tan that I think was named “Tim”.  The sales manager arrived early to the station on Tim’s first day to ready Tim’s work station.  As the first to arrive, he was the one that discovered the cleaning woman had hung herself from the water pipe in the sales area.  He called the police, who quickly cut the body down well in front of Tim’s first day of work.  When other more industrious employees than myself arrived that day and inquired why a police car and an ambulance were in the station parking lot, they were told that it was “nothing”.

3.      Tim began work with no knowledge that a woman had killed herself about six feet away from his cubicle maybe eight hours earlier.  Tim’s career at the station was brief.  He was best remembered for bringing a prostitute to the company Christmas party as his date.  However, my finest memory of him was the event that led to his dismissal.  He had the Tangier nightclub in Akron as an account.  One night he showed up there drunk and demanded special attention from the club staff.  The staff complained and told the owner.  The owner decided to ask Tim to leave.  This situation denigrated into the two of them punching each other in the face as they rolled down the stairs wrestling.  The owner naturally called the station the next day to complain about one of their representatives punching him in the face.  Tim, sensing this could be an issue, refused to show up to the station to be fired.  His reasoning was that if no one physically saw him, they couldn’t cut him loose.  Eventually someone got him on the phone and fired him, though it was almost a week later.

4.      The new evening DJ was a recent hire from Philadelphia.  He came in with a reputation for being great with the teen audience that the station commanded at night.  I remember him coming in to the sales area pitching us on booking him for appearances at teen clubs, movie premieres, and any other place that catered to teenagers.  “I love working with kids.”  A couple weeks later, two plainclothes detectives from Philadelphia arrived at the station after hours.  I saw the security tape.  They had on tan trench coats like a bad TV show.  They arrested the DJ and took him back to Philadelphia to face charges of child molestation.  Before the trial he killed himself in his parent’s garage by closing the garage door and letting the exhaust do him in.

       I would sometimes have difficulty getting my commercials scheduled.  The woman that placed the commercials on the log would sometimes be in the closet across the office from her fucking the chief engineer in the middle of the afternoon.  It got to the point where it was so routine that I remember knocking on the closet door telling her through her heavy panting “Hey, we have to move those Dick’s Sporting Goods spots out of tomorrow.  Make sure and do that when you are done in there.”.  She usually remembered.  She was pretty good at her job.

6.       The woman in charge of accounting would go out to her Firebird at lunch and smoke pot.  She always smelled like weed and cigarettes.  She was stoned 100% of the time.  If you walked into her office quietly, sometimes she would just be sitting there totally zoned out.  She played on the station softball team.  I have an image in my head of her playing second base with a cigarette dangling out of her lips.  She was a pretty decent contact hitter, but the constant smoking made her a bit of a liability in the field.  I have no idea how she balanced the books.

7.       The station program director replaced a guy that was so deeply involved in payola that the record companies would openly call the receptionist to arrange satellite dish TV system installations to his home, vacation trips, patio remodels, and drop off envelopes of money in exchange for airplay.  The new guy was not as openly on the take, but soon descended into drug fueled madness thanks to the 5 “nights out” a week the sales staff booked him into.  He hosted two hour nightclub appearances for $200 cash which we shook loose from club owners in addition to a paid advertising schedule.  He made a lot of money, but the bad news was he spent it all on cocaine at the clubs.  This made him wildly unreliable.  The first time he went to rehab, the station manager gathered the staff for an extremely awkward meeting where the program director apologized to all of us for his behavior and broke down crying.  We all sat in our seats and watched him cry for what seemed like a century.

8.       The morning drive guy fucked the new sales girl at the Christmas party.  When news of this indiscretion spread like wildfire, she decided to exact her revenge by telling station management, the DJ’s agent, and the DJ that he had made her pregnant.  The station DJ was remarkably unfazed by this.  There was a very official looking meeting where Very Important Men In Suits sat down around a table flanking the sales girl and the DJ.  The sales girl repeated her claims.  The DJ produced a medical record of his vasectomy performed a decade prior.  The case was dismissed, the sales girl left, and two weeks later she surprisingly was my waitress at Antonio’s Pizza in Parma in a meal I would describe as “awkward”.  

I could keep going.  It was a pretty out of control situation.  I recognize that everyone has a different definition of what “crazy” is to them.  Perhaps a spilled bowl of cereal and a dog jumping up on your daughter is crazy to this woman on social media.  It’s not though.  That stuff I just talked about?  Now that shit was crazy.  You know what?  It’s the best job I ever had too.