Gail Force Productions

I thought when I started this blog that I would be a lot more diligent about getting on here and updating. What I am finding out is that working a “real” job as opposed to working til 3pm and then leaving for the day, is a lot harder than I thought! Not mention taking care of the grand-baby a few days a week and on most Saturdays from 8:30am til 10:30pm.

How do you ever get anything accomplished when everything closes at 5pm or 5:30pm!? I have been terribly spoiled haven’t I? Finding the time or energy to get things done was pretty tough the first few months but I think I have my mojo back!

I am still struggling a bit with the new job but I am getting there. Do I want to do this the rest of my life? I ask myself that a few times a week. I feel a bit lost every now and then and have little twinges of melancholy when I think of the 30 years I spent in radio. Looking at the other news items and hearing from some of my radio friends I know that I am not the only one has had to redirect themselves.  I read a story on Yahoo the other day about some guy who was making $750,000 a year and lost his job. He couldn’t find anything else and is now delivering pizza. He has a huge house, a wife and a couple of kids. I doubt very much that what he is making is putting any kind of dent into the debts he owes but you have to give him credit for getting out there and doing what he has to do. I am sure after the story ran he got some job offers that are closer to where his experience lies. But I can’t help but wonder, what did he do with the money? Just because you make that much money does that mean you have to spend it all?  I guess the wealthy live paycheck to paycheck too. I also read a story about Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the US. He still lives in the house he bought back in 1958 for $31,000. Granted, it is still 6000 square feet and pretty nice but I find it impressive that he doesn’t feel the need to upgrade in relation to the size of his bank account. Do a google search for Warren Buffet, house, and check it out for yourself. But then again, I wonder if he has “vacation” homes? Quick search and I see that he does have another house worth about $4million. According to Forbes that’s still less than one hundredth of a percent of his estimated net worth.

I have a friend who left Alabama to go work in Savannah at a Cumulus cluster. She was let go about a month ago. She spent a lot of time applying at radio stations but nobody is hiring.  She may get a job at a hair salon. Someone else is going to work for an insurance company. We do what we have to make ends meet. Until there is a change in the way radio does business our radio carreers may be over. She is still young though, and single, so she has no problem packing up and moving across country. For those of us that have invested so much time and energy into one market the thought of selling our homes and leaving friends and family is not something we want to consider.

People ask me every day if I miss being on the air. My answer is yes. I do miss being on the air. I don’t miss the stupid politics and lamebrain decisions made by people who have no idea about local markets. I do miss connecting with listeners, the regulars who would call me everyday and say hello and chat with me. I knew their lives, their families and their jobs. I am sad that I don’t get to talk to them anymore.

I miss talking about things and ideas. I catch myself when I hear something, read something or observe something and I think “I need to remember that so I can talk about on the air tomorrow” and then I remember that there won’t be any time spent on the air tomorrow.  But that is happening less often now.  What I need to start doing is using this blog space to talk about those things. I just need to discipline myself to do it! It is so much easier to crack a mic and chat then to get on my laptop, sign in and put it all down in words. How lazy is that? I should start carrying a little hand held recorder and I could make notes. Oh wait, my phone does have that capability.  Well, I have run out of excuses.

As far as my voice work goes I have been lazy about that too. Of course I have been doing plenty for my new job at Commercials on Hold but I haven’t done a lot of outside stuff lately. But I have re-signed with a talent booking site and am determined to get crackin’ doing some demo’s and hopefully pick up some more work.

 Sometimes I feel like I am 17 years old again trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. My mind goes in 6 different directions and all I do is go in circles. Do I want to pursue this? Do I want to do that? Should I take some courses? I guess if I had a large bank account that allowed me some breathing room the decisions would be easier. It would be nice to be able to take some courses that would allow me to explore different avenues but right now I don’t see that happening. Instead I have been focusing my attention on remodeling some rooms in my house. Simple stuff like new paint, some crown molding and chair rails. That makes me happy and painting walls is very therapeutic. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it the repetitive motions that sort of puts your brain in a trance. Or it could just be the fumes.

I know this blog is a bit disjointed. As I said, my mind is going in so many directions. But at least it isn’t just going!  I would like to hear from others that are in mid-life and have lost their jobs. What are they doing? What thoughts are going through their heads? Are they using this time to pursue dreams they had before life got in the way? Before family and responsibilities took over? Are they thinking outside the box and using this time to brainstorm and come up with new ideas and dreams? Or are they foundering in depression and self-pity, locking themselves away from those that love them and reliving the past? I hope not. You are only given one life and it is meant to be savored no matter what circumstance you may be facing.  Somebody asked me the other day how I could stay so calm amidst all the turmoil in my life lately. Not just the job loss but other things as well. I told her that even though sometimes I don’t feel so in control of my life that there is One who is. I know that God has plans for me. It may not be the dreams that I would envision for myself but if I allow myself to be open to the possibilities that are in front of me and continue to pray that God gives me peace in any situation I will be OK.

It has been a while since I have had the chance to get on here but it is a beautiful chilly Saturday morning and the house is empty.  I am enjoying sitting on the couch with sun pouring in the window warming me with its winter time gentleness.  I have an empty coffee cup and a mind that is full of ideas that are in need of being let loose.

Since October all my energy and time has been spent finding another full time job. I spent a lot of time on the job boards and doing voice work auditions. God was very good to me and provided quite a bit of income during that month strictly from those auditions. He really saw me through that upheaval. You say it is because I was devoting more time to auditions therefore the odds were that I would get more work. I say I got more work during that time because I was sending more prayers upward asking for help.  I think I am right.

I started working for Commercials on Hold full time in December. I really am so grateful to Allen and Barbara for creating the position for me. Commercials on Hold was one, if not the first, on hold message provider in the country. They have been around since 1982 and currently serve thousands of clients with professionally customized on hold messages. (www.commercialsonhold.com) I have been a voice-talent for them since about 1995. I have voiced for hundreds of clients from car dealers, to banks, to HVAC dealers and everything in between. A few years ago I went to work part-time for COH doing production. Meaning I edited and mixed the voice sessions that were produced by not only me but by the other voice talents as well. I had talked to Allen during that time about possibly working full time but I wasn’t ready to leave radio even though I new the day was coming when I would either leave on my own or be forced out.

Then the economy did a nose dive, I lost my job and nobody was hiring for any position unless you were in in the medical field.  I was thisclose to going to work for a collection agency doing telephone collection calls when Allen and Barbara took pity on me and created a position for me full time. So now I would be doing all of the above and customer service/sales too.

I have never done sales before so this was a pretty big risk.  Well I did a short stint while working at WSTR in Sturgis, Michigan.  The air talent was given a chance to make some extra cash and try sales. Since I was making pretty much zilch as an air talent I thought I would give it a try. I think I went to 3 businesses and was basically turned away at the door so I went home and took a nap.  This went on for about a week when I realized that doing cold call sales was not for me. I never tried it again because I limited myself by what happened when I was 19 years old. There is a lesson here.

Why do we put up walls and tell ourselves we can’t do something because we tried it once and it didn’t work out? Why don’t we take into consideration the fact that time passes, we learn new skills, we become different people and what was once true 20 years ago is no longer true? I am not the same person I was at 19 years old. Thank God.  Life has forced me to grow and change. I was like a little sappling back then just trying to avoid being mown over by the big lawnmower of life. But as time passed I grew stronger and taller and learned to sway and bend when the winds of adversity tried to knock me down. It’s funny how we still equate ourselves to what were, not what we have become.

I think back to all the things I walked away from because of fear. One evening I was working on the air at WNWN in Coldwater Michigan and I got a call from some guy. He asked me to say “W” four times quickly. I laughed and said wwww not having a clue as to what was going on. He then informed me that he was the Program Director at WWWW in Detroit. A huge radio station. I was just a 21 year old with a new baby and really had no clue about anything but my own little world.  He told me he liked the way I said “W” and that he also liked my show. He then told me he was interested in hiring me and wanted me to send an air check to him. He was traveling to Florida at the time and was listening to me on the radio. I was pretty excited about it. Detroit! The Big City! This was huge. But the days passed and the more I thought about the more I let my insecurity get the best of me. I kept telling myself that I couldn’t do it. That I had only been in radio full time a few years. That I wasn’t good enough. Before I knew it my window of opportunity had passed and I had talked myself out of what could have been the start of a whole new path for me. I don’t look back on it with regret only the curiosity of what might have been.

There was one other opportunity I walked away from because I let fear and insecurity get in my way. I had been working in Cincinnati for WUBE. I had been working there as an evening air talent and also assistant program director. I was expected to be there at 9 or 10 in the morning and then take a dinner break and do my air shift. Being a single mom with a 12 year old at home and expected to work from 9am til 1am was not working out for me or for the station. So they released me. (Which is really a nicer way to say Fired”!)  I went to work for a trucking company doing data entry. I had a good friend who worked there and she pulled some strings to get me hired so I would have some income coming in until I found a “real” job. I sent out tons of air checks to radio stations all over the country. I had determined that I was not going to work evenings anymore. That I needed to be home at night to keep my son out of trouble. My roommate was doing a good job but he needed a firmer hand.

I was getting some pretty good job offers but I was holding out for what I wanted. Then I got a call from a friend who wanted me to become the sation manager for a small radio station in the south. I don’t remember where it was now I just remember the paralyzing fear of taking such a big step! I gave him every excuse I could think of why I couldn’t take this job. I wasn’t experienced enough, I didn’t know how to read and interpret Arbitron data, I didn’t have management skills, blah, blah, blah. He did his best to assauge all those fears and told me it was a small station, that I would learn on the job that I had great people skills but I wasn’t hearing any of it. All I heard was “huge responsiblity, huge leap of faith, huge step away from my comfort zone” and I turned it down.

Looking back now all those things I said were true. It was a big responsiblity. I was a huge step away from my comfort zone and it would have been big a big leap of faith but so what? I had had responsibilty before and I had been away from my comfort zone before and I had taken huge leaps of faith before and I didn’t fold up and die. I made mistakes, I learned and I excelled. Why was this so different? But I let those walls stop me from taking a path that I couldn’t see clearly down. True, I might have failed but so what? Would it have meant the end of the world? Why am I so afraid of failing? And that is the crux of the matter. Fear of Failure.

For most of us, failure does not mean that the world will stop turning. That CNN is going to have a special news story about my colossal misstep. We aren’t going to see our fall from grace on E’s True Hollywood Story or in People magazines year end special of the Worst of the Worst. Most people will forget about you after your gone. Unless you are some Wall Street muckety muck, who’s greed and megalomania caused the collapse of civilization as we know it, most people don’t care that you “failed” and they are just waiting for the next guy or gal to fill your shoes. And that would have been the case if I took that job and failed. But the memory would have stayed with me and I have hard time dealing with failure. 

I set high goals for myself.  I expect to be perfect. When I mess up it bothers me for days on end. That is one thing I won’t miss about being on the radio. If I made a huge blunder or I had a bad day I would start the negative patter in my head. “Why are you on the raido? You suck! Nobody listens to you why do you bother? You are horrible!” I am pretty sure that most listeners didn’t notice that I didn’t sound as good Tuesday as I did Monday or that my pronunciation of that word wasn’t quite right. Heck, 3/4 of them probably didn’t even remember my name. All they cared about was when the next Taylor Swift song was coming up. So why beat myself up daily for something that, in the great scheme of things, wasn’t really all that important? I wasn’t curing cancer, teaching children, fighting fires or protecting the citzens from thugs or terrorists. I was a DJ, an air talent, a personality. I was just the spicy mustard in between the good stuff on my listeners radio sandwich.

The Point is that I was now back to where I was at 19 and I couldn’t let the girl I was then influence the adult I am now. I have some 20 years of experience in life that I didn’t have then. She is gone and I am here. The old fear demons that I allowed to perch in my head have been banished and  I have new found confidence.  After I lost my job with Cumulus I actually had someone call me and ask me if I would be interested in being a station manager for a Cumulus radio station elsewhere. I felt those old fears rising but I was able to quash them down. Fear is not what stopped me. I knew that radio no longer held my heart. That it was time to try new things. I would have loved to stay in radio tfor the rest of my life but just like me radio changed. Like lovers we started off shy together. Testing the waters to see how far we could go together. Then a commitment was made and we grew together and I remained true when the times got tough.  As time went on I could see changes on the horizon. Radio was turning fickle, the things that once pleased her no longer did and I started to drift away but never fully cut the bond. Eventually I decided it was easier to stay than to start over with someone new. But I had lost the excitement. The little fire in my belly everytime I turned on the mic had cooled. So when the time finally came that I packed my things and walked out the door it was more a feeling of relief than greif. I was given the push I needed to walk away from a lover that no longer loved me.

Ok so it sounds sappy but it fits.  

And here I am testing the waters again. But I have confidence in myself and there is no fear. I am not allowing myself to have doubts. I am allowing myself to have freedom. The freedom that comes with belief in myself and confidence in knowing that I can do anything that I put my mind to. That and lots of prayers are what will make me successful in this new phase of my life.

What fears have you placed in your path that that have held you back? How do you overcome them in order to move forward?

Oh. I am still doing voice-work. Just because I am no longer on the air doesn’t mean that using my voice creatively isn’t important to me. I have always considered my voice a tool given to me by God. To not use it as such would be unthinkable. So if you are here on this site looking for a voice talent here I am!

I can’t believe that it has been two weeks since I was let go from Cumulus.  It seems I am busier now than I was when I was working. Only I am not getting paid. Which doesn’t make for happy days.  Where does someone like me fit into the marketplace now? As I stated before I started working when I was 16 years old. I have worked steadily since then. Excluding time off for medical purposes this is the fist time I have been without full time work and I don’t like the feeling.  I am finding that regrets are popping up now and I am trying to keep them at bay. I ask myself why I didn’t I go to college, why I didn’t take a certain job when it was offered to me, why, when I saw the way things were going in the industry, didn’t I take the appropriate steps at that time to ensure that I wouldn’t be in this situation. Regrets are not productive. They don’t help me in my search for work.

So what have I been doing? Auditioning like crazy for voice work jobs. Which in itself could be a full time job except, again, you don’t get paid. Unless of course you get hired. I have gotten 3 jobs these past 2 weeks. One decided to go in another direction after I had completed the work. Which is fine except that I put several hours of my day into completing the project. The other has been a week long process that involved lots of emails back and forth, a few phone calls, waiting and then “I need it this morning”. Finally the last one involved voice “acting”. I have never been an actor. Never been on stage except to bring on an act at a concert or show. Well I did have a part in some small play at the community theater in my home town. I had one line. That doesn’t make me an expert by any stretch of the imagination. You could say being an air talent on the radio was acting but I never acted when I was on the air. I was just myself and that seemed to work for me. So doing this voice talent job that required a real “mom” was a learning experience. It took a few redos but I think in the end I nailed it.

I have discovered something else. I may have been the best at what I do here in this market but when the “market” includes the whole world it is a whole new ballgame. There are thousands of voice talents auditioning on line now. You have to be different, you have to know your strengths, you have to be honest with yourself when a job is asking for something you can’t deliver on even though the pay sounds great. For example I know I can’t do accents. I can’t even do a great southern accent even though I have lived in the south for 20 years! So even though a voice seeker is offering a nice fat paycheck for a project it would make no sense for me to waste my time on it when I know I won’t be producing my best work.  There may come a time when he/she needs just what I am best qualified for ad if the last memory they have of me is fumbling my way through the last job that they posted, that I knew I wasn’t the best for, they aren’t going to look at my name on the audition list and say “I can’t wait to hear what she has to offer me on this new project”. Chances are they won’t remember my name from all the other auditions they listened to but they might. So why take the chance? I need to be selective even if that means a day without auditions. And believe me, there are some really talented voice over actors out there today and they are getting lots of work. So part of this  free time that I have now is used to really spend more time honing my voice talent craft.

I have realized also that I can’t just depend on voice work to get me through at this time. It is going to take some time to build up a client base and I need to make money now. I have been trying to figure out what the perfect job for me is. Well the perfect job for me would be a Food Network Travel Show Host.  How awesome would that be? My second perfect job would be what I dreamed of doing when I was in high school and that would be a psychologist. I don’t think that is going to happen although if I had the money to do it I would pursue that in a heartbeat.  So what is left for me? What skills do I possess that I can put to good use? What is important to me in this new phase of my life? I want to work from home.

There are tons of jobs out there that promise fast money all from the comfort of your home office.  Well we all know most of those are scams. I think I will just ignore those.  Twana, who is a great friend of mine, suggested a book she saw promoted on one of the morning TV shows. It is called “Will Work from Home” by Tory Johnson and Robyn Freedman Spizman. So I hit Amazon and purchased the book the same day she mentioned it. It is filled with great ideas for folks like me that can thrive in a home work environment. I have pretty much worked by myself for 30 years. When I was on the air I was in the studio by myself for 5 hours a day. As a matter of fact I stayed away from the sales and management office’s downstairs to avoid the office “drama”. So I have no problem sitting in my home office for hours on end working from home. There are many people who thrive on being surrounded by their co-workers who wouldn’t be happy unless they had the daily hustle and bustle of the office to keep them energized and ready to work. I can live without that. But I did enjoy talking to listeners and helping them out when the called me for information and answers. I can’t tell you all the odd questions I have received over the years. With the addition of the computer in the studio answering those questions became so much easier. So I usually had no problem doing a quick search or if I couldn’t find the answer right away I would have them call me back and hope by then I had the answer to their question. I found it very gratifying when I problem solved. So I think Customer Service from the comfort of home would be a pretty good fit and there a several reputable companies out there do employ or contract with home based workers.

Yesterday I spent most of the day applying for some of those jobs. I did work part time for a major insurance company in their call center for about 16 months a few years back so I do have experience and know what I am getting into.  Sort of.  But it was fun doing some of the assessment tests they had you fill out or participate in. One company even has potential hires go through a virtual day at the office. Taking calls and problem solving after a quick on line training session.  I think I did pretty good! I will say if you are going to look for these types of jobs you need a whole day and no distractions to really look and apply for them. Some of them have pretty intense screening processes.

Something else that caught my eye was becoming a Virtual Assistant. I don’t really have the experience for that but there is an online course I could take  called Virtual U. I haven’t really checked it out yet but I know that it is something you have to pay for.  This job is much more involved. A VA is pretty much a administrative professional and you can have one client or many. I haven’t really delved too far into this one yet but I plan on it.

I guess the next question for me is do I want to get back into radio? Part of me says yes. Part of me is a bit leery because of the way the trend is going to automate everything. Maybe this is the best time in my life to take a new direction. I am really looking at my options as far as the Internet goes. What is out there that I can turn my talent towards and make money? The Internet is an ever expanding entity. Something new pops up every day. There are always new ways to make it work for you. If you have an idea and a plan chances are you can make money at it on the Internet. If you do your homework and if you are willing to put the time and effort into it. So I have been doing a lot of brainstorming and also talking to a few people mulling over ideas. I do recommend a course called The Thirty Day Challenge, www.thirtydaychallenge.com, if you are interested in doing something on line and plan to make money at it. I have just started it and I am learning a ton of stuff. Will I ever start my own on line business? I don’t know yet but because I have been checking out the options that are available to me out there I am coming up with some ideas. And keeping my brain in tune, churning with ideas and plans, is much better than letting it atrophy in my unemployment funk.

Thanks for checking in!

PS

One more thing. I have another website set up under www.gaildaniels.com. I haven’t gotten anything going on that one yet but I may move some of the stuff I have here, like my personal work autobiography, over to that page and use this page as more of a marketing tool for my voice work and other things. So even though there isn’t any content on it yet please sign up for it. I have some things I want to blog about on that site too!

Technorati Tags: Cumulus, voice talent, work at home

I grabbed these off www.allaccess.com which is an online industry magazine. These are the latest firings from Cumulus. I guess it is good to know that it wasn’t just this market but is sad that so many fine people are out of work. And this list is just from the last few days. I didn’t feel like going into the last several weeks and finding all the people they let go. And it isn’t just Cumulus. It is all the big Corporate Radio companies that are slashing jobs.

Downsizing At Cumulus/Houston?

ALL ACCESS hears the budget cuts have made it to HOUSTON, with Adult Hits KHJK (JACK FM) PD DAVE DILLON out.

More details soon.

ALL ACCESS has learned that the budget axe has fallen at CUMULUS/TOLEDO, with nine layoffs so far, including Alternative WRWK morning host KEVIN MURPHY. We hear WRWK will now be music intensive – no jock at all; Country WKKO middayer BILL MANDERS, a 38 year TOLEDO radio vet; Oldies WRQN night slammer BUDDY CARR; Country WKKO night crawler CRAIG SNYDER, who’s been with WKKO since about 1988; Hot AC WWWM afternoon driver DAVE FULLER and morning producer/Promotions Asst RYAN YOUNG; Cluster Traffic Mgr. TIM MCMAHON; WXKR/WTOD/WLQR/WRWK Promotions Director TOM STAUDT and Sports WLQR pm drive host MATT MELZAK.

Some are reportedly being retained for part-time.

Re-alignment of duties reportedly has WWWM/WRQN PD RON FINN going from doing live middays on WRQN to voicetracking the shift, leaving FINN to team with WWWM host LYN CASYE for WWWM AM drive. CASYE will also VT nights on classic rock WXKR.

Three Exit Cumulus/Youngstown

CUMULUS/YOUNGSTOWN parted ways this morning with 3 veteran air personalities, Classic Rock WYFM (Y-103) night time legend DAVE MESSERSMITH is out after 23 years on the air, and Country WQXK (K-105) night jock BURTON LEE and morning show co-host K-MAN.

YESTERDAY Top 40 WHOT reportedly let all part time air staff go.

Will all 3 stations will now run syndicated programming in the evening?

CUMULUS Classic Rocker KSAN (107.7 THE BONE)/SAN FRANCISCO eight-year veteran PD LARRY SHARP exits his post. Sister AAA KFOG PD DAVE BENSON will assume his duties.

Yikes. You know that Cumulus and other companies won’t be filling these jobs. They will voice-track, syndicate or just run music with station jingles. As long as the shareholders still get their money they don’t really care about the folks who have been in these markets for nearly 30 years! I thought my 15 years was a lot.

As for me I made my first trip to the unemployment office today. It actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. With all the people who have been let go from their jobs this past week in Macon I thought there would be a pretty long wait. All in all I was there just over an hour and most of that time was spent filling out paperwork and then filling out an online form. I don’t really understand the need to fill out paper work and then do the same thing online but whatever. I was thinking that maybe I should get a job there since the gentleman that was supposed to be helping us was on the phone having a nice personal conversation. I was thinking does he think we are non-persons? That we are invisible and can’t hear him? He was so wrapped up in his conversation that I ended up helping one fellow fill out his online claim. I told him that it was first time there too but I would do what I could. So I pulled up a chair for a minute and walked him through some of the form. Maybe that got the guy off the phone because he hung up after that and started helping all of us that were confused as to what we were to do.

I am thinking that I am not going to qualify for much since I do work part-time. But at this point anything coming in is better than nothing. I find myself so hesitant to spend money. I had to buy gas today and was so thankful that the price has come down. I needed some groceries and went to Wal-Mart. I hate shopping at Wal-Mart. I don’t really know why. I think it is because it messes with my sense of order. Silly, I know but to me Wal-Mart is not orderly. It is too big, too busy and I just want to get in and get out. But I did find cereal that was cheap. Don’t buy it in the box, buy it in the resealable package. You get more and it is cheaper by nearly $2.00. Why is that? I can’t tell you the last time I have bought hotdogs but I bought them today. Well turkeydogs. Some veggies, milk, bread, eggs. You know, the basics. I seriously need to talk to Victoria. She still has a job with Cumulus and we have spent some time talking about how she shops smart. She uses coupons, discounts and she can buy 8 bags of stuff for the price of 3 bags of stuff. She needs to tutor me. I need to be tutored. I didn’t do to bad. I made it out of there for under 40 dollars.

Next week I am going to have to buckle down and really start looking for work. I have been auditioning for an on-line voice over company. You can audition for voice overs for radio ads, tv ads, website narrations, books on cd, things like that. I have got two jobs lined up. Yay for me! Hopefully I will pick up some more.

I have a friend who is trying to get some home improvement jobs lined up. He is good at ceramic tile, installing crown molding, chair rails, flooring. He has done work for me and we are going to try and line up some small jobs. I love doing small home improvement work. I love painting and designing a room. So he made up some cards and is going to pass them out. I even asked my neighbor if he would be interested in hiring me to scrape and paint the fascia around his house. It was rotting and he finally got it replaced about 5 months ago but he still hasn’t gotten it painted where new lumber was put up. So it is bare and exposed to the elements. I would be happy to do that job. For a fee.

So ends my first week of unemployment. I kind of took it easy this week although I was on the computer and auditioning for voice over jobs. Plus I went in every day to my part-time job. So thankful for Allen at COH for being so kind to me there and giving me some extra hours. I thank God that I have good people in my life. I have gotten so many nice comments on my myspace page from listeners. I appreciate that so much.

I guess if I get some time this weekend I will post Chapter 2 in my work biography. I have been reliving those days in my head for the past week. Now it is time to put them down on paper. Or in this case on the blog.

Do you have any money saving hints? I would love to hear them. Leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: Cumulus, jobs, shop smart, unemployment

Or…what do I really want to accomplish with this site.

I have to say thanks to my cousin Ken Gary. Ken is the one who built this site for me. It was a gift and a complete surprise. He sent me the link and when I opened it up and found this page I was pretty stunned. He told me to have fun with it and use it however I wanted. He is pretty sharp and has a great background in computer programming and has a ton of his own sites. So thank you Ken. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. So the past few days have been discovery days. I have been trying to discover how to use this site and trying to discover what I want to do with my life. For those of you who don’t know, on October 24th of this year, after working in radio for 30 years, 15 of them at WDEN in Macon, Georgia, I was released from my job due to Budget Cuts. It wasn’t just me. There were cuts in Cumulus markets all over the country. Along with me others cut in Macon were longtime WPEZ morning personality Paul McClelland, B95 night-time personality Zander and DJ Whiz from our Urban station Blazin’. So instead of sitting at home feeling sorry for myself I have been talking to others about what I want to do with my life and my career. This is when Ken decided to build me this website and that brings me to my “Mission Statement”.

My main goal is communication. I have always loved writing. It was a passion of mine when I was much younger. My mother encouraged me to write and to this day is still hoping that I will write a book. Instead of a book maybe it will be a blog. I am on a journey. I want to log the steps I am taking. I want to talk about the loss of not only a job, a career and a passion but also the loss of a bit of identity. Gail Daniels, mid-day personality on WDEN. That is who I have been for 15 years. 30 if you count all the stations before that. I have always believed that it wasn’t wise to get too caught up in the fact that you were on the radio. It could not become the most important thing. I knew that it could all end one day and if radio was the only thing that identified who I was, was the only way I felt validation in this world then I would not be able to carry on if it all ended. I think I did a pretty good job of remembering the important things in my life were what formed the nucleus of who am, my family, my faith, my belief that what I do as far as work is not what makes my life worth while.

So here I am. The day has finally come that I feared would come and it is time to see if I can walk the walk and talk the talk that I have been telling myself all these years. I am Gail Daniels but I am not “Gail Daniels”. Maybe by doing a daily blog I am just substituting one public persona for another. Possibly. But I have always shared my life on the air. I guess this is my way of still sharing. I may only have one reader, well two (thanks Tina and Dad!) but it will be my release and a way to chart the path I am on.

So. Communication is one element. Work is another. I have other selfish reasons for doing this blog. I want people to know I am available for voice work, voice talent, commercial voices, radio voices, on hold messaging, book narration, corporate narration, website narration, website training narration. Whatever need there may be for voice work I am available. I have my own home studio and equipment to do it. I can write and produce complete ads and if I can’t do what you need when first asked I will figure out how to do it. So work is pretty important.

I am also thinking about doing a daily entertainment report like I did on WDEN. I have the ability to write and record a short show and post it on this site. Maybe it won’t be daily but it might be something that will do a few times a week or once a week.

For now these are the things I will be concentrating on. Communicating my personal journey, finding work and comments about life in general. I hope you will join me and if you like what you are seeing please encourage others to check the site out.

Here’s to new beginnings.

Technorati Tags: book narration, narration, voice work, website narration

Life changes, Nothing ever stays the same. So I am about to begin a new chapter in my life. All the chapters leading up to this one have been filled with great memories, sadness, happiness, adventure, mistakes, you know, all the things that make a story great.

Chapter One

My radio career began at the tender young age of 17. I worked from the time I was legally able. My first job was at River Forest Nursing Home. It was run by some sort of Mennonite group. My best friend in High School was already working there and convinced me that we would have “great fun” working together. So my weekends were spent clearing slop off the plates and trays of the residents of the home. First of all, the food that these folks got was nursing home food. For old folks. So it was soft, bland and not very pretty. If you thought it looked bad going out you should have seen it coming back in. I believe these poor souls were so unhappy that they were dumped into “the old folks home” that they took out on us lowly kitchen workers. Napkins were shoved down into the glasses with mashed potatoes dumped in on top of that. It was like a parfait of regurgitated food and paper.

Each tray had a small metal holder, like you would use at a party to designate the seating arrangements for your guest. You would put a pretty little card in the holder and everyone would ooh and ahh over how cute it was. Our card holders would hold the patients name card and all the dietary limitations that they had. After every meal we had to dig them out of oatmeal, eggs, squash, milk, coffee and potatoes again. They were laminated and we had to wash them off and stick them back into the holder for the next go round. I was 16. Not the romantic adventurous job I had in mind for my first foray into the working world. I will never forget the smell of urine and disinfectant that permeated that place.

One of the residents that I will always remember is Ike. Ike was somewhat senile. But he was still a randy old man. He had a cane that he used and anytime a pretty girl would walk by he would take that cane and smack her on the butt. Come to think of it she didn’t have to be pretty. We learned to stear clear from him and cling to the other side of the hall when he was making his way down it. He also had a tendency to let it all hang out on occasion too. If you know what I mean.

One bright spot in my day was talking to one elderly lady who still had it together. I wish I could remember her name. I think it may have been Olive. Both she and her husband were living in the facility. They weren’t in the same room. It seems the Mennonite woman frowned on that. Women in one wing, men in the other. But every waking hour those two spent it together. It was so sweet and it made me dream of having a love that would endure forever.

One thing that I did not want to endure forever was being a dishwasher at a nursing home. So I scoured the want ads. In my little town that would take about 10 seconds. Or less. But lo and behold I found something I thought I could handle. Being a dishwasher…..at the hospital! So I hauled myself up there after school one afternoon and applied. I didn’t have a car and getting use of the car was an act of congress. But the hospital was about a mile or so from school so I could walk every afternoon and my mother or someone would pick me up. I believed that this job would be much better than the nursing home. Wrong. Now when trays came back we not only got the food parfaits but syringes that nurses would forget to dispose of properly. This was before the AIDS epidemic so things were a little more lax. Band aids, Gauze, finger splints, whatever. It would end up on a tray for the dishwashers to take care of.

The hospital was old. The elevators were like something out of a horror movie. Well the staff elevator was. There was nice bright shiny one in the bright shiny lobby for guests to use. I dreaded having to ride that thing upstairs and down. It was dark. The hallway TO the elevator was dark. What was worse was having to go down to the basement to get supplies. Dish washing soaps, towels, cleaning supplies. Another horror movie set. Dark and mysterious. I always thought there might be dead bodies down there. The morgue. But to be honest I have no clue. And since the hospital only had something like 50 beds the chances that there Zombies were running rampant in the basement hallways were pretty slim.

My hospital bright spot was a boy. I don’t remember his name. I remember he was cute. You know, the important stuff. Unlike the nursing home the dish washing area was in a separate room off the kitchen. He and I would have water fights with the spray nozzles. We would laugh ’til we cried and the “mature” women in the kitchen would roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders and then ignore us.

The hospital is where I first learned to wrap baked potatoes in aluminum foil to keep them from drying out. Hey were talking 1976-77 here.

But even then the economy fell and I got laid off. It was back to the nursing home. Part-time. So in what would become a lifetime habit of mine I got a second job working at Jim Vetter Ponitac Buick as a receptionist/bookkeeper. For some silly reason they wanted me to help out with bookkeeping. I had to enter figures into a ledger. Me. The queen of transposed numbers. Then they expected me to reconcile it. Me. The queen of bounced checks. Ok..again. This was before everyone used computers that did all that for you. Needless to say I did all my entries in pencil. Eventually they threw up their hands and just had me on the phones. It was at this time that I had my first clue that I had voice people liked to hear. I would have great conversations on the phone with customers who called and who would tell me how much they enjoyed listening to me talk. I had so many compliments that I thought I always wanted to be receptionist.

So I was working part-time at the car dealership and part-time at the nursing home when the full-time position of cook came open at the home. I was offered the job since I had been pretty much doing all the cooking when I was there anyway. I was just out of high school 17 years old and I thought it sounded like a pretty good move for me but I wanted to see what else might be out there so I checked the help-wanted ads in the paper and saw an entry that intrigued me. Our local radio station, WLKM, was looking for part-time weekend help. Now this sounded like fun. Much better than poached eggs, dry toast and the other “gourmet” dishes I was cooking up. So I drove out to the studio on the outskirts of town and applied for the job.

I was taken into a studio, a mic was placed in front of me and I was given some news copy to read. I recorded it on a reel to reel machine and I was fascinated by the big black board with all the knobs, switches and dials. I loved the sound it made when you clicked the mic toggle switch. “SNAP”. I was hooked.

Amazingly, they took a chance on a 17 year old girl with no experience and hired me. It was a whole new world.

Stay tuned for Chapter 2 coming soon.

Technorati Tags: biography, jobs, radio