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So say you're a famous television evangelist and all of a sudden you find yourself as the owner of a state radio news network in Florida, something completely out of your wheelhouse. Can you imagine it? Well, whether you can or not, what do you do? Well? You gather up the staff and pray for profit? Of course, what else? I'm Jim Polling and this is my view from the middle. So in the last episode of this thing, I talked about Bud Packson, the idea guy behind the Home Shopping Network, and how he bought the Florida News Network, of which I was a manager. I was talking about Ivory Tower managers, of which Bud was one. Ivory Tower managers are those people who are disconnected from the people who work for them, to the point where they really don't understand what's going on in their own company. But Bud came by it innocently, and although it took a bit of convinsing on things, to his credit, he would eventually come around before any real harm was done. As a result, Paxson was successful in most of his endeavors from the time I started at FNN until the time I retired from the business. At the end of twenty twenty one, I worked for five of the six entities that claimed ownership of the network and ten different general managers. In addition to my duties with FNN, I most of the time had a radio station to program, usually a news talk station owned by the same company in the same facility as FNN. One of these owners was the television evangelist Pat Robertson, Yes, the Pat Robertson who started the seven hundred Club on National Television and the Christian Broadcasting Network CBN. Now, I have absolutely no idea what or who compelled Robertson to buy this thing, but he did and we were stuck with it. You can't pick your family, and from my position in the middle, I couldn't pick who bought the network. At first, I was pretty pollyanna about the prospects being owned by a big company like CBN, but that optimism faded the first time the power company showed up at the front door threatening to turn us off for non payment. This was the story with everything, thankfully except for payroll. Somehow they always made payroll, but we spent a good portion of our time making excuses to vendors who hadn't been paid or the landlord, etc. It's kind of hard to operate a satellite radio network when you have your satellite vendor constantly threatening to shut off your means of transmission. The accounting person in her office would sit at her desk where her hands folded desk need is a pen, and I'd ask her when a certain bill would be paid, and her answer was always the same, as soon as Kevin wires me the money. Kevin was the CBN controller. So she sat there with basically nothing to do because she had no money to pay the stack of bills sitting in her inbox. Meanwhile, the phones are burning off the hook with angry creditors. Maybe she should have not paid the phone bill first. Robertson paid a visit to the network once, not sure he totally understood what it was all about, but he gathered everyone Christians like me, Jews, atheists, agnostics alike, and had us all pray for profit. I suppose if he understood the business he purchased, he might have prayed that advertisers would see the value in disseminating their message, or for the health and happiness of everyone on staff, or something like that. But no from high atop is Ivory Tower. He prayed for profit. He left and we never saw him again under Pat Robertson's ownership, though we had a GM named John Channon. John's background was in national network radio and was always proud to tell us stories about when he produced the Olympic radio broadcast for ABC Radio. John was a good guy. He knew how things worked, but he was a little loose with the checkbook, which wound up being his downfall. John had a reverse case of Ivory Tower syndrome, and that I don't think he quite understood the financial impact his extravagant spending had on the bottom line of the company. It goes both ways. I mentioned the corporate controller named Kevin, the guy our accounting person was always waiting on to wire her money. Well. John, frustrated with the bill paying situation, would call up Kevin, and in this voice it sometimes sounded like a mafia boss making a deal you can't refuse. Would say to him, understand, I don't like you. I guess he took it personally, but before he got to that point he had a very positive influence on FNN and me. He was a crusty old sort and most of the time he would tell you things would happen his way or not at all. I worked with John in producing a series of baseball game radio broadcasts for an experimental league that never really got off the ground in Florida. Now I mentioned John was a little loose with funds. Well, when setting up this project, John needed to order the remote equipment. Now, some people may order one set of equipment, maybe two, so you would have a backup. John ordered four sets of everything. Four. We spent more on that equipment than we ever made an advertising for the games. During the broadcast, we all wore headsets to communicate with each other behind the scenes. As each broadcast was getting organized and ready to start, John would put on his headset and announced to everyone listening on the closed circuit channel. Everybody on headsets shut the up. A little crude, but he made his point. At least he didn't pray for profit. Sorry, I'll get over that. Another story about John Channon was the day I got angry with him. I don't remember why I was mad, but I was steaming. This was before email and we were still typing paper memos to each other, and I typed out a doozy to John letting him know exactly how I felt. I used all sorts of inflammatory and accusatory statements the memo, but I typed it up, didn't sit and think about it, which was a major mistake, and put it in John's mailbox at the network. The next morning I came in and in my mailbox was my memo to John, folded up. I unfolded it to find a piece of paper with holes cut in it, like it was a piece of Swiss cheese. It looked like a Nazi censor had gotten to the memo because apparently John had taken a pair of scissors and very carefully and very precisely gone through and cut out all the inflammatory words and phrases without additional comment. He initialed the memo at the bottom and put it back in my box. Message received and understood. We never talked about it. So I had some dealings with some unique individuals. To put it mildly, sometimes I was just a casual observer, like when the general manager of Whoo, the country station I worked for before I got fired and wound up at FNN, fired one of the ladies in the office. We later found out that this GM was having an affair with her well, I guess that's what you'd call it in the clean world. She was fired the day after they threw a birthday party for the GM at the station, and she went to the local bakery and had a penis cake custom made for the event. Yes, a penis cake. I will spare you the detailed description of the cake's design, but just imagine an Eclaire and chocolate sprinkles and let the eu factor take hold. Somehow, he didn't seem to appreciate it. There was no official reason given for the ladies termination, but when we found out later about the affair, somehow the Eclaire and sprinkles kind of well fell into place. Other contributing factors to Ivory Tower syndrome are the brown nosers. These are the people who are working for the manager who tend to go along with and compliment the manager, whether they actually agree with them or not, and hopes that this will earn them brownie points and advance them in the organization. This gives the manager a false sense of entitlement because he or she thinks that everyone is on his or her side. Some of the other traits of Ivory Tower managers include the fact that they love having meetings. Personally, I hate meetings. If I call a meeting, people would get nervous because they thought something horrible was gonna happen. But Ivory Tower managers love all kinds of meetings as long as they're the ones running them. These include scheduled meetings, unscheduled meetings, managers meetings, managers, lunches, managers, retreats. They accept that most of the time these were colossal wastes of time. My fellow middle managers and I used to use a code word see what cwot colossal waste of time to communicate the type of meeting we were about to attend. So here I am in the middle Ivory Tower managers above me, who have no clue about what was going on with the people below me, clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, and here I am stuck in the middle with you. Unlike Bud Packson, most Ivory Tower managers never would let anyone tell them they were wrong about anything. Or maybe it was just me who couldn't tell them they were wrong because I wasn't brown nosing them properly. That's possible. But other than orbiting kiss ups who had their own agenda. I really didn't see any evidence that anyone else was having any success at it either. All I saw were brown nosers padding along behind the managers day to day will roaming the halls of the Ivory Tower. I'm jimpoling and that's my view from the middle. In the next episode, it's a name droppers paradise and multiple brushes with greatness. The rest of the story next on my view from the middle.