Ray Slakinski

Sparked by my blog entry entitled ‘Humble and Fred gone bye-bye‘ was a thread about the total loss of talent at MOJO radio. Ripkin being one of the radio personalities that were lost, and the rumors and speculation started to fly in the comments section of that entry, until all the rumors stopped when non-other than Ripkin posted his story. It all started with a question:

hey folks, it’s ripkin. nice to hear someone actually listened to me and johnny b. wanna know the real story?

Well needless to say, we all did, the truth had to be known, and known it is now, because Ripkin soon followed up his question with:

well, as far as bob goes…sat, sun mornings and sat sun evenings (the miracle of voice tracking)

as to the mojo thing. there’s the official line – salary dump. not true. they offered me a lot of money to leave.

then there’s the theories. the one i subscribe to is that i had had a meeting with human resources about the negativity in the workplace as well as the fact that most people at the station were mysogonist (sp?) pigs. a lot of people spent a lot of time on the web too, surfing for porn. it really turned me off. (now, i’m no prude but it gets to a point when you just have to say something) women were badly treated in the workplace too. they had to grin and bare the male dominated workplace or adapt or quit. most of them adapted. (keep in mind these words are mine and mine only so this is my take on what happened)

a week or so later i get a call in saying i’m toast. no reason. in fact i spent about six weeks trying to get a reason, any reason. no dice.

the fact that they gave me a ton of money leads me to believe that someone gave the order to get rid of me. i think, because i was on the inside, and i had told the h.r. chick so much crap, they just needed to get rid of the squeaky wheel. i think they thought i might go public with the horrific (my opionion) management over there.

there was also an issue with a bit i did on a particular religious/ethnic group that ran four times before a client heard it and threatened to ( or maybe did) pull his/her advertising $. i was hauled across the carpet until it was pointed out to management – by me – that the bit in question had run four times.(repeats, best of, etc.) so now i think management thinks i’ll go to the client and tell him/her that it ran four times.

either way, someone needed me out of there asap.

one of the options i was presented with was to continue working for the summer at a scaled back, late night position. i accepted that and then they pulled it off the table. obviously they never thought i’d take it.

i love the speculation on your blog though. pretty interesting reading about yourself from people who are so sure but they’re dead wrong.

so that’s it in a nutshell. any questions?

So there you have it, the real deal!

Its moments like these that I’m happy to blog I’m listening to Ripkin now on BOB FM 99.9 in Winnipeg via Windows Media streaming. On that note I now listen to MIX 99.9 and Newstalk 1010 both of which are Standard Radio stations. Standard Radio seems considerably better managed than Corus, thus the quality of programing and talent are higher in my humble opinion.