Warning…Copious Whining Ahead

I have never been one to get depressed during the holidays. No I get depressed when I can’t find something to wear, have gone through my entire wardrobe (which then lays in disarrayed on both floor and said bed,) resultantly I spend the next hour totally engrossed in self pity, crying on the bedroom floor in front of my empty closet. Weeping. Sadly. Weeping. But that is another story. I will say, before I go on to my real topic, this: If you are physically young (pre-menopause and wear a nice tidy size of say 10 or 8) and you smoke, stop now, because if you do it at menopause you are going to gain 70 pounds and are destined to find yourself weeping. Sadly. On the bedroom floor. Far too often for comfort.

Radio is a great industry, I love my job, it is creative, current, and strangely I get paid to play music while sitting in a little room all by myself. But if you are thinking of finding a career to make a living and want to enter radio, especially small town radio…Reality check! You need to be really good, a really, really wacky A – type personality (some sort of mental illness would probably help) and live in a mega city … LA… Chicago… New York. Not Florence, Oregon. And, oh by the way, I am not an A – Type personality, although my sanity has been questioned several times. Ergo, I don’t have a lot to offer my job (as in no dazzling, witty personality) and know that means I have to try to make myself indispensable – all the while knowing that no one is indispensable.

After years of hints from my boss, and I mean very gentle hints, I said last year that I’d take on some clients and work sales. It’s a way for me to make extra money. Most of my clients are area entertainment venues and troupes and not-for-profits, but my new cliental come from all walks of local business. With the down turn (isn’t that an understatement?) no one wants to advertise. Especially from me, it appears. I understand not wanting to strain your bottom line, but in a community where only one tenth (according to a recent poll) of the community shops in the historic old town area, wouldn’t that make your advertising all that more important? I mean really, attract your potential clients to your store, work to get your share of those buying dollars this holiday season.

Or say you’re selling Christmas Trees wouldn’t you consider radio, too if last year only advertise in the paper and ended up throwing over a hundred trees away? It’s Christmas, if people know you have trees at great prices their going to buy…but only if they know about it.

As you’re whining (hey, I know whining when I hear it) to your sales rep that the economy sucks and people aren’t shopping, shouldn’t you consider advertising your wares, services, and sales? Just wondering?

This morning I told our office manager that I couldn’t sell a parched man in the desert on drinking a glass of water for free. I need to be positive to sell, but in all truth my face is an open book, so when you have been telling me for months that you were advertising your Christmas Trees beginning Thanksgiving week and then say, “No we’re going with the paper, unless you’ve got a special” my face is going to drop, because I’m not good at poker. How I kept from responding, “No, you turned the Chamber Hometown Shopping special down last month”, how?

Now I am discouraged and apparently bitter. I feel like a fool trapped on a ship of nincompoops. A bad economy responds negatively to a lack of funding by becoming worse. Ergo, if you spend no money, the economy becomes more repressed, suppressed, and depressed. This holiday season please spend wisely, but none the less, spend. You can’t help me, but we can all help the economy.

Oh, and we’ll eat chocolate and douse our woes in Kahlua.

Sith,
Cele

OH, PS I will try to blog gratitude tomorrow for Talk Thursday, last week. It is such a good topic, thanks to Lynnblossom.