I got fired for the 7th time in my life in mid-April. As I sat at the edge of the desk at the South Carolina Employment Security Commission office telling my tale of woe to the case manager, I thought to myself, What the hell is wrong with me?

How does anyone get fired 7 times at the age of 45? I blame many of my career setbacks on radio broadcasting. I started in radio when I was 20 years old and have enjoyed my best pay and most success in the world of radio. It seems like every time I try to leave broadcasting, I fall flat on my ass and remain there until the next radio job comes along. Well&this informal system had been working out fairly well but since deregulation and consolidation of radio began in 1996, new radio jobs are increasingly hard to come by. With 3 or 4 companies owning every single radio station in the Greenville-Spartanburg market, once you are exiled from one, you're pretty much out in the cold for good. Radio used to be a nomadic business, you got fired or you took a better time slot and you moved on and you progressed. Now everyone that still has a radio job is just digging in their heels and holding on for dear life.

Radio has ruined me in the real world of business. Decades of sitting in a darkened room by myself and basically doing what ever I wanted to do everyday, as long as my commentary was entertaining and garnered decent ratings, aren't behavior patterns that breed success in the corporate world. Ive become accustomed to complete autonomy, in a relaxed and often fun environment. Granted my hours were beyond weird. For years I rose at 3:30 AM and was in bed every weeknight by 9:30PM. This schedule didn't make for a very active social life but the fact that you are essentially free to go by 10AM in the morning softened the blow.

Maybe it's my age but I find myself nostalgic about the good old days of radio. I started in the business when I was a sophomore at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. WLBJ FM radio in Bowling Green, Kentucky was a small one owner AM/FM station and it was the best job I ever had, ever. I began as a part-time weekend employee, running the soundboard on Sunday mornings for the preachers who came in to try to save souls. There was some irony in the fact that most Sabbath mornings I was severely hung over and then guilt ridden after listening to the sermons at top volume, two feet from my chair. But I shouldered on and eventually worked my way into an afternoon time slot and the impressive title of Assistant Program Director. The absolute freedom of this job stands out in my mind. Announcers arrived 1 hour before their time slot to select the music that they would play for the next 4 hours. What fun it was to select your favorites from a wall of vinyl records. It seems almost comically novel to me now to think that when people called in and made requests their requested songs were actually played in the next hour and if you felt like hearing 3 or 4 songs by the same artist during your show, so be it. I remember there was a window near one of the turntables and the wind from the open window once blew the arm off the record. That seems so long ago and so far from possible in this day and time that it makes me feel ancient.

Other people's judgment of my career success or failure shouldn't matter to me but it does. I do care that people view me with pity. I hate the long pause after the innocent question, What are you doing these days, Roxanne? My mother used to get furious with me when I would honestly respond, Not much, since I got fired from my last job. The humiliation of filing for unemployment and being interviewed about your termination and subsequent unemployment is certainly uncomfortable. But all of these negative feelings are counterbalanced by the sheer joy of waking in the morning and having your agenda be set by you. If I want to read the paper in bed while sipping coffee for the next hour, I can. If I choose to work in the yard or surf the inter net, I can. I'm in love with being left alone to my own devices.

Which leads me to the next problem. My problems with authority. This is the reason I could never join the military. I HATE being told what to do. I'm smart enough and old enough to know what to do and unless I ask for help, I don't appreciate being supervised and bossed around within an inch of my life. As you can imagine, as a woman in a man's world, my resistance to and opposition to authority figures has been quite problematic. My tendency to polarize people also works against me. People in general love me or hate me, there is no ambivalent in-between in their opinion of me. But once again all roads lead back to radio. My strong personality, vocal opinions and resistance to authority work well or at least used to work well in radio broadcasting but don't serve me well in the 'real' world of commerce. So what's a girl to do?