If being an announcer was really that easy everyone would be doing it

I've got one of those jobs that people think they can do no matter what their skill set.

Some broad examples of what's been said to me are

I could totally do your job because I had this teacher in whatever grade tell me I spoke well enough to be on the radio.

Or a variation of this gem

I could totally do your job because Dave Wilson told me I  have a great voice.

Or how about this one

I could totally do your job and STILL do my regular job because you only work 3-4 hours a day

Or, you've always got that person that listens to your station, and thinks they work here somehow.  They notify us day and night (notice I didn't say day OR night.  These people are relentless.) about different things.

I have them divided into categories.  There's the slighted listener: "Hey, you changed the morning show and I'm never listening again".  The Engineer:  Something is malfunctioning or something is old or something is in the wrong order.  Or, my personal favorite, The Music Programmer:  The guy who thinks anything on his phone by obscure artists is what a mainstream station should be playing.

Of those 3 above there's only one we care about, the slighted listener.

It's hard when things change and we get that.

Let's clear some stuff up about being on the air.

Me, JD, Nick Northern, Pat Frisch, Big Billy, Jason Laird, Charlie Heit, Skip Walters, Dave The Morning Guy, and tons of others are actually trained to talk on the air.  We all spent thousands of dollars and a portion of our lives learning how to speak to you in schools or classes that specialize in broadcasting.

We don't get to pick the music.  I can't stress this enough.  Not only do we not get to choose the music, we don't even have any INPUT as to what should be played in our market.  This has been the case for awhile now.

Most of us have been in broadcasting our entire adult life.  I've been working in radio stations for 37 years.  (OMG I can't believe it's been that long.) JD, and Nick can say the same.  We've seen a thing or 2.

I've seen ONE PERSON my entire career walk in off the street, get a part time announcer job and turn that into a career and that's Bejay.  It's just not something that happens.

We run our own shows here

We don't have producers like in a big market.  If you don't know how to work a board you will never get a shift in Montana. This is a board

I'd like to note that the engineers I've worked with over the years would KILL an announcer over this picture.  Know why?  The cup on the board.  No self respecting announcer would ever put a cup on the board like that empty or not.  I won't even get into how it doesn't have a lid.

We put in long days

To put this one to bed, in general, I work a 9 hour day.  Most of us here work like that.  Fair week, MAGIE week, or an ownership change, format change, etc, that can be days up to the 16 hour mark or more. Think I'm lying? Ask a sales person how MAGIE week was for them. Ask Nick about the toy drive he does in December for Toys For Tots.

The only job I ever worked that had as many or more people tell me they could do it was bartending.  That's literally another story for another day.