Category Archive

Jackie and I are buying a boarding kennel in Washington State.  It’s a nice, successful business in a little community a few minutes west of Olympia.  There’s a small house on the property where we’ll live.  Our mothers were helpful in making this happen and my mom is planning to move out to the area soon.  That’s a very good thing.

I’ll miss Montana, I’ll miss radio….especially the great people I work with.  Maybe I’ll be able to do some play-by-play in Washington.  There may be a way that I could still remotely contribute a bit to the Montana Radio Company….we’ll see.  I have a lot of mixed emotions of my 30 years in radio….I may have to lay those out here some other time.  Jackie and I just realized that we were treading water and that we really were not in control of a lot of things in our life.  We have had our eye on kennel properties for a few years, even checked one or two out.  This one just seemed right.  There’s a large client base and we hope that we can interest them in some services not currently offered: board & train, agility, maybe some retail, perhaps some future grooming/massage options.

We made an offer, and it nearly fell through while we waited for the SBA process to churn along. (Don’t get me started on big banks again.)  Then our Montana home sold MUCH faster than we ever anticipated, leaving us very little time ’til closing.  So, I should go.  These boxes aren’t going to pack themselves.  Remind me to pack the umbrella and raincoat last so I can unload them first.

Letter I just sent to my Bank of America Loan Officer

Dear Kxxxxxxx:
The IRS will not even allow me to hold right now because of the call volume.  They suggested that I call back tomorrow.  Screw that.  I work for a living.  I’m out and I hope the only further contact I have with your horrific company is to continue to write the mortgage checks that I have been faithfully scribbling and mailing for the past 100 months.

I cannot believe that a form from the IRS with my SSN and my wife’s SSN and our correct address that happens to have three extraneous digits after the zip code raises red flags.  This is obviously the property in question.  Your company and the underwriters appear to have no desire to help hard working, deserving people refinance their homes.  I also would like to thank your greedy company for making this process impossibly difficult by approving thousands of unqualified people for loans they could never repay in the lead up to the recession that BoA helped cause.

I’m out.  I’m done.  I will consider the $550 paid for the appraisal as a small stimulus to our local economy.  It is a sad commentary that my wife and I cannot get refinanced.  We have an amazing credit score.  We were HAMMERED by the recession that your bank helped to create….I lost a job and spent the past four years scratching back to where I was in 2009.  Along the way I was forced to spend my life’s savings and 401-K.  But your company – rated the worst customer service company in the entire nation – always received my mortgage payment.  Dealing with BoA these past several months has been an excruciating ordeal.

I hope you are paid well and I hope that you have some wonderful things in your life….family and friends and other blessings.  I know that if I had your job and had to be the one to deliver these asinine requests to honest, reliable, hard working homeowners I would be forced to either do copious amounts of drugs or simply sit in my car while it idled in my closed garage.

Sincerely,

Dave

Jackie arrived home yesterday to find our dogs fully engaged in protecting the house from an angry deer.  After watching this go on for a bit…and getting some video….she sequestered the dogs and investigated further.  Less than 100 feet away she discovered the deer and her fawn.  There was a second fawn only feet away, but Jackie didn’t notice that one at the time.  After mother and fawn #1 left, Jackie finally found the second, weaker newborn baby.  It was unable to stand so she carried it across the ditch and laid it next to its sibling.  We think they’re all okay.

I have quite a few friends in small town, local media…mostly radio.  I’m begging you to stop embarrassing yourselves with the ridiculous attempt to draw eyeballs to your station websites by rewriting (or worse, copying and pasting) national news.  Your little radio station in Montana is NOT a national news gathering organization…it’s barely a local news gathering organization.

Today was the last straw as you fell all over yourselves to repost the erroneous information reported by CNN that a suspect was in custody for the Boston Marathon bombings.  It’s one thing to just link to the report from Facebook…but that does you no good.  You first have to copy the story on to your website and then link that page to Facebook.  Your soulless corporation cares only about eyeballs on your precious webpages.  I understand…most of you are fine people….compelled by your  boss to post “X” times each week whether you have anything newsworthy or of any interest at all.

Even worse is when you steal local information from one of our legitimate local newsgathering organizations and immediately reguritate it back on to your station website.  I cannot count the times that I have seen a Montana TV station or newspaper post a breaking story on Facebook only to see it appear a few moments later on a local radio station website.  It would be nice if you redirected your listeners/fans back to the original source who actually devoted the manpower and resources into reporting said story.  But, that would leave you shy of your quota of posts and precious web page views.

Please, have some pride and integrity.  Stop being Lemmings.  Stop polluting my Facebook timeline with something I can easily find from its original source.  I want to follow your radio station on Facebook because you are my friend and because I care about the UNIQUE things you actually do at your job.  In fact, I’d rather read what you ate for lunch that day than have you be the 17th source that incorrectly told me that the Boston Bomber was in custody.  I’d rather read two original posts about your radio station a week than a dozen attempts at pretending you are some national news source.  I beg you to knock it off.

Local radio is struggling lately….I remember when stations had parties to celebrate ratings success – now they throw parties to celebrate their online page views.  It’s still possible to do good radio and serve your community.  It’s still possible to connect with people.  Be original, be true, be unique.  Create more and celebrate and share what you create.