Rafe Is No Lame Duck

You'reFired
StayOnVille


Rafe Mair was fired by the folks running Jimmy Pattison's AM 600 last week.

His last show was Friday and he took the highroad all the way.

But in an interview with Public Eye Radio, Mr. Mair revealed something interesting:

"We just had a really good feeling it was starting to rock along. And I got a call from the manager to pop in after the show on Wednesday. And he said they'd decided to terminate it. And that was that. And, of course, the idea was that I might stay till the end of the year. And I said, "You've got to be kidding. If I'm going to get paid, why would I work?" So we decided that the day after that - on Friday - would be the day I'd call it a day. And that's what happened."

(emphasis mine)

So why is this interesting, aside from the fact that it demonstrates that Mr. Mair is no dummy?

Well, it also means, protestations to the contrary, that Mr. Pattison's managers still wanted a piece of Mr. Mair's ratings. If not, why would they have asked him to stay to the end of the year? To our ears, this suggests that there was more to this decision than just the rate of return on Mr. Mair's salary because, based on their desire to have him stay on, the best pure business decision would have been to have him play out the string until the bitter end (ie. that would have given the greatest amelioration on his salary that they have to pay out no matter what until August 2006).

So, if there really were non-business factors that contributed to the 'Gag Rafe' decision, what they might have been? Well, if we were to going to be so bold as to hazard a guess, we might suggest that Mr. Mair's recent statements on things like the coming open season on oil and gas exploration, not to mention who will build and own all those new pipelines, might have had more to do with it than his longterm stand on fish farms.

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