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Management OOPS

N

normhill007

Guest
I was at WARM at the end of the Jim Davey regime and all of the Phil Condron days. Neither caused too many ripples. They would come in at 8 and almost run to their offices, not to be seen again until 5..Didn't have problems with either..Phil needed a personality transplant and had the same look if he liked you or hated you, and would rarely have anything to do with riff raff..Just after one of the Susquehanna retreats in the Bahamas, Ron and I and a couple of others were in the main production room downstairs just BS'ing and Condron walked in with his normal blank look, looked at us, and we wondered what did we do now. Phil then told a real bizarre joke and then turned around and walked out the door..I think I was the one who asked "what the hell was that" and Ron replied, "I think he took a Dale Carnegie course on how to win friends and influence people. Any other bizarre GM stories out there. By the way, Ron was, contrary to popular belief, a good guy..you just had to allow a lot of time for him to warm (no pun intended) to you. Took me about 6 months. One night, (early morning) the phone rang so I got out of bed..And it was Ron telling me he was the new PD and I was the new music director and we were going to go back to the old WARM. Worked for awhile until York started to complain. So we kept doing what we were doing and did it Susquehanna's way whenever they came to town.
 
Just remembered another big oops from WARM that was really funny. We had a newsman called Mike Macowitz who was o.k but not stellar-from WARM he went to a station in St Louis so he obviously had something we didn't hear. Anyway, Phil Condron was going to fire him on Tuesday..However, the Times Leader ran the story about him being fired on Monday..Condron had to pull back on the firing. Still don't know how the Times Leader got the story before it actually was to happen.
 
Another management oops at WARM was flying their engineer Chet to Texas to pick up and drive the mobile remote studio (you aptly named the MRS) back to NE PA... only to realize when he arrived there that it was a "stick" and he didn't know how to drive one... oops!
 
Another embarrassing oops was when WQEQ held it's Halloween kids party in its parking lot... Called "I'm Drug Free", we gave away lots of kiddy things that we told the sales staff to get from sponsors. We stuffed bags with the small gifts and had the kids sign a I'm drug free" pledge before they left. We thought it was a big success until we opened a few of the bags of goodies afterwards. In them we're decks of playing cards with Joe Cool Camel on them (smoking of course) and hat pins for Miller and Bud Lite! One of the sales staff solicited gifts from our local beer distributer sponsor and never realized what he got! Oops!
 
emo said:
Another management oops at WARM was flying their engineer Chet to Texas to pick up and drive the mobile remote studio (you aptly named the MRS) back to NE PA... only to realize when he arrived there that it was a "stick" and he didn't know how to drive one... oops!
Click to expand...

It wasn't Chet. It was Ron Allen's friend, Tony Spadoni. I'm not sure it was the truck that came from Texas. It could have been one that came from Norfolk. I'm positive about the individual involved, but not the location.
 
Just remembered another Phil Condron OOPS while reading John Hancock's post on Melanie Apple's passing when he mentioned the Great American Race. We traded out a bag phone for me to use while doing traffic and Condron asked if I would mind giving it to one of the Times Leaders reporters (I think it was Scott Wasser) because he was going to go with one of the teams from California all the way into WB. Didn't bother me much as I didn't use it much anyway..Scott filed 3 reports a day, sometimes more..About 6 weeks later I was sitting in the lobby minding my own business and Condron came out, red in the face, and asked, bluntly, "What the Hell did you do"..my reply was "give me a hint"..He handed me a bill from Commonwealth (Cellular 1..Cellular Plus?? whatever incarnation) for almost 3 Grand..I looked at it and said "Scott Wasser"..Totally speechless, he walked away..Scott had been roaming at a buck a minute from coast to coast.
 
The cell phone story reminds me of the time WNAK got its first bag phone and decided to try and use it from the Nanticoke Fair during a remote. Bob Nielson and Rick Nyedhardt called in, did the report, and then placed the phone back into the holder in the van - not realizing that the phone didn't hang up when placed in the holder, but rather switched to hands free. Five hours (at $1 a minute) later, they finally shut the thing off. A few weeks later, when Nielson saw the $300 bill for the phone call, he LOST IT. I remember that bag phone sitting on an empty sales desk in the office with a "DO NOT USE" note taped to it.
 
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