Now, as I say, volunteer role. Everyone involved got nothing from this, except the bloke running it got a chance to inflate his ego. I should have known it was a mistake after a text exchange two weeks in. I got food poisoning. I text to let him know I wouldn't be in. He replies “You aren't needed anymore. Thanks.”
A couple of hours later I get a phone call. “Oh, I was only joking. Will you be in tomorrow?”
Things went mostly ok, but he could be a bit off. He was insistent everyone in town knew who he was, and there were professionals in the industry that loved him and everything he had to say. (Turns out there were professionals that knew of him and, on balance, I've heard a lot more negative than good.)
“I used to phone in and play a character for this guy's show, and they'd be falling about laughing, they thought I was hilarious.”
He couldn't understand why I never laughed at anything he had to say.
I remember one situation where he was in a crap mood with me because I couldn't figure out a solution to a networking issue we had. Trying to get multiple computers running the same playout system to work as one. “Anyone with half a f****** brain cell could do it”. This bloke then couldn't do it.
Stuck with it for a couple of years. Through the pandemic, this bloke kept clear as he was more susceptible. So I'd go in every day to keep everything in order, make sure the system was running, and keep news and music up to date. I set up a YouTube for the station and produced multi-camera live streams for local buskers to perform in the studio. I put in more effort than should ever go into an unpaid role.
Time goes on, people come and go and there came a point I truly realised how delusional he was. A host contacted us to let us know he'd tested positive. This bloke hit the roof, raging at everyone that we had someone who “was stupid enough to get it and bring it in here”. He asked for a meeting with another volunteer who had years more experience in community radio than I did. That meeting ended with him screaming at this volunteer “You're fired, get out of my building!”. Wasn't his building, was a community project he was renting the top floor of. After demanding 5 figures worth of work done to make it a professional grade studio and eventually only ever paying 3 figures. Low 3 figures. Anyway, he gets to the front door and he's fake calm in front of people saying “He's so unprofessional”. After everyone on all 4 floors just heard him screaming “You're fired”.
I wanted to be gone. I kept clear and other people in the building warned me where he was because they knew I'm mentally vulnerable (long history of issues). I could hear him “I seem to have lost one of my employees.” Gets corrected “You mean volunteer.”
“You know what I meant, where is he?”
I was done with him that day. I have a bad habit of burning myself to keep others warm but it stopped there and then for him.