Crisis 5: Stress-Related Weight Gain (From 6 Crises: Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

I gained a tremendous amount of stress-related weight while I worked at the station, not because I had a stressful job, which I didn't, but because of my stressful personal financial situation, from which the job at the station became a gentle refuge where I often fantasized about sleeping in the premium closet and stowing my clothes in one of the boxes in the upstairs office and saving on rent.

I seriously considered this move for a while (and I wouldn't have been the first staff member or volunteer to live at the station, not by any means) but never acted on the impulse because the late night shows were so loud and because even when I wasn't living at the station I tended to keep a lot of my things there, in the premium closet; coats, a change of shoes, a laminating machine, prints, a supply of magnets, photo paper; card-tables; the old 10 x 10 canopy and frame that I used to vend my wares at art festivals - essentially the entire infrastructure of my personal art business, and people would often ask me suspiciously if I was living at the station when I wasn't and I realized that it would give me no satisfaction to begin living at the station when everyone thought I already lived at the station.

At the time I began at KRCL I'd been living in a friend's apartment downtown while he roamed the country in search of a woman. It was a temporary situation because with his looks and charm and funky car it was only a matter of time before he found one, and then he would return in triumph and I'd have to vacate the apartment and move on, which is what eventually happened, and I had to move in with another friend and her 17 dogs in a tiny house out by the freeway. Then I moved again, back in with my parents', which is a wonderful place to live if you want to save money because you pay no rent and can't go on dates.

Eventually I moved out of my parents' house amidst the tears of my beloved mother into a room in a house in Sugarhouse and all this moving combined with my complete financial collapse and all the free food I horked during the Radiothons induced a great deal of stress-related weight gain and my health began to fail but I managed to stem the tide temporarily by eating only one dinner per night, but that only slowed down my inevitable physical collapse, and I went from stealing Large t-shirts from the premium closet to stealing XLs, to the sober contemplation if never actually actualizing the possibility of stealing XXLs.

At which point I felt ashamed and thought of all those people who'd actually donated money to wear those t-shirts and had looked so proud and happy when they'd come by to pick up their t-shirt because we'd never sent it to them in the mail like the phone answerer who'd taken their pledge at the radiothon had promised they would. And when they'd come in and tell me that I'd shake my head sadly and look at my computer and frown with concentration and smile ruefully and suggest something to the effect that the wonderful people who came in to answer the station's phones during Radiothon hadn't checked the right box on the pledge form and it couldn't be helped because they were fantastic radio activists and we loved them like family but they were so wiggy from all the drugs they'd ingested in their youth that it was a miracle if they managed to put even one legible piece of crazily scrawled data where it belonged on our unavoidably complex pledge forms.

Speaking of pledge forms: At some point in my KRCL career I'd gotten a little wiggy myself from Doctor Pepper or Diet Coke in the vending machine, and I'd actually volunteered to be the one to design the radiothon pledge forms for some Radiothon and ended up doing it every Radiothon thereafter. I began the task believing that I could make those radiothon pledge forms, which the phone answerers filled out when taking pledges during radiothons, so simple and easy to follow that even if one of our on-air volunteers stumbled by accident into the green room during the fundraiser and answered one of the phones, they could milk all necessary data necessary from the caller and record it by following the natural flow of the boxes and arrows and bold-lettered statements on the form with unswerving obediance.

It never entirely worked. I began by boldly slashing at the form template with a red pen, eliminating all sorts of wasteful fields like the "have you donated before?" box, and enlarging necessary boxes and embolding the scripted parts like "Is your Mommy home? Do you have her credit card?" so that the phone answerer's eye would be drawn and their mouth impelled to speak what had been written.
But I ran into trouble when I brought the rough draft to staff meetings and asked for imput and Betty would try to add thank-you gifts and Stan would add address fields and Carlita (name changed, actually applies to three different Business Managers who held the jobs at different times during my term) would fret over the credit card info and try to put in all sorts of tiny little check boxes for installments and special codes and actual names on the cards and will this card really go through? and Annette (name changed) would offer some completely bizarre suggestion or not even pay any attention to the form at all depending on her mood, and I would pound the table and demand total obedience to my form and say that the whole point was that the form should be simple and stay the same every radiothon so people would learn it - and Betty would try to trump me by saying that if I really wanted the form to be used the way I wanted I should train the office managers which meant that I would have to attend the office manager meeting which she knew I most certainly would not do.

Eventually I would be defeated and they would get some of their changes and we'd change the form and get it re-printed just in time for the radiothon's first day to end, by which time the true radiothon pain had begun for everyone because months before the radiothon I'd say we couldn't add any thank-you gifts after I'd printed out all the cards for the thank-you gifts on the day before the radiothon began, because it took too long to re-print the cards and I'd have to add thank-you gifts to the database system but first I'd have to add the thank-you gift codes to the database system and by the time I reached that point in the explanation I'd get impatient and throw up my hands to heaven and say; "It's just too hard! We can't do it!"

So everyone on staff would agree and nod their heads sagely and Betty would tell me, sternly, not to let people talk me into adding thank-you gifts after the radiothon had begun. "You tell them no," she'd say to me, wagging her finger. And everyone would agree and on the day before radiothon I'd print out the cards, and usually end up re-printing the cards, and finding some number codes doubled up, and re-printing, and then realizing that I hadn't counted the codes correctly and now I had too many of one number and none of the other, and re-printing, and I'd usually stay up until 9 pm or even 10pm on Friday night before the Radiothon...

And the next day the Radiothon began, and by the time I dragged myself to the station at 11 or so and the radiothon had been going for hours the panic had begun to set in, the first show hadn't made goal, and nobody could find the cards and Betty would come running to me and ask me where where the thank-you gift cards...
"We had to write some up for the book-set"
"For what?" I'd cry.
"Gene brought some book-sets to give away. Don't worry, we won't give them a number so it won't offset your...'system'" and as Betty would say 'system' she'd make quotes in the air and cross her eyes like to say "Coo-koo! You and your crazy system!"
And I'd find all these cards that Betty had cut out from construction paper with strange numbers and codes that had nothing to do with the cards produced by the database, and then Betty would tell me she'd already used the concert tickets that they'd set aside for the afternoon program, so we'd have to use the ski passes that she'd gotten in the mail this morning, and I'd pound the table and complain and weep but the radiothon had begun, and Betty had that sharp, focused but deep-within-herself look in her eye, like a cougar chasing a rabbit out onto a highway and never even registering the semi bearing down on it because the rabbit was right out there only a few paces away, almost within chomping distance, so sweet and white and succulent...

And everyone on staff would have the same look in their eye as one show followed another with their financial goals and nervous volunteer host who'd been reassured over and over again that radiothon totals would not effect the status of their show but that everyone had to pull together and a few months before they'd yanked the global music because it was struggling and nobody listened and it never got any pledges at radiothon anyway, and so the host and the staff would beg and implore people to call in with pledges and the hours would go by and they hadn't got hardly any calls at all and maybe they should offer one of the ski passes or maybe a CD set, Yes! A 3-CD set, what a brainstorm, that would work! And the staff would run into the on-air booth where the volunteer sat sweating and directing nervous jerky glances at the clock and trying to look calm and they'd tell the desperate, imploring volunteer that they were gonna pitch 3-CD sets and that would get the calls rolling in!

And above the on-air booth and miles away in perspective I'd be sitting in the Development office and Betty or Stan or Anne or Carlita would bring up a wild tangle of pledge cards stained with coffee and smuged inkstains and tell me they'd offered a 3-CD set, or a rope-tow, or a wooden flute, or a tye-dyed parachute, and written it on the form itself because they ran out of construction paper to make cards, and don't worry about mailing it because the volunteer host offered, on-air, to bring the gift to the donor's house next week (Sometimes they forgot). And from my peaceful aerie above I'd shake my head sadly and roll my eyes and ponder the sterile beauty of the original conception of my pledge form and the carefully numbered cardstock thank-you gift cards I'd printed and wonder what in the hell people were getting too down there...I usually listened to CDs up in the office, so I wouldn't be disturbed by the desperate pitching on-air...

Every once in a while I'd saunter down and cast a quick, shuddering glance at the motley group of phone answerers they'd dragged in from some lunatic commune south of Price, and then at the frenzied, sweating pitch-coordinator and volunteer host through the door of the on-air studio, then I'd hurry back to the kitchen before anyone saw me, on a quick foraging mission for any stray doughnuts and soft drinks and maybe leftovers from the free lunch or dinners that were provided for the whole Radiothon...

Crisis Resolved:
I suffered a number of existential panic attacks which frightened me into cutting back on the food and drink because I thought they might be heart attacks even though doctors told me they weren't heart attacks. And I ran so low on money that I had to stop eating at Wendy's for lunch. Everyone remarked on the weight loss and asked me how I did it and I told them I took pills.