Quick Note Before We Dive In:
Thanks so much for your patience the last couple of weeks. I know I missed my usual Sunday send—and now it’s two weeks in a row. I'm still catching up on life after Easter—and honestly, just the daily grind too. I really appreciate you sticking with me.
Starting next week, we’ll be back on schedule with Sunday drops. And next Sunday, you'll get Part 2 of this ridiculous story.
What you're about to read is Part 1 of a lost weekend in Vegas—a trip with the radio station crew back in 2017 that went about as well as you’d expect. Hope you enjoy it (and yes, it only gets dumber from here).
If you're digging these pieces and want to support the work, you don't have to sign up for a full subscription—you can also leave a one-time tip here. Every little bit helps keep the lights on (and the stories coming).
Thanks again for reading. -Shannon
There’s a video buried somewhere in the ancient corners of the internet where you can see Bret—my coworker, my friend, my "work wife"—running down the hallway of the KUPD Guadalupe studios with a pair of scissors, blades facing forward.
It’s about as stupid as it sounds.
I filmed it on a janky handheld camera, back when the idea of "internet video" still felt like an open invitation to do anything dumb without worrying about optics, sponsor complaints, or basic adult dignity.
Bret’s scuffed Vans scraped against the stained, crusty carpet—the kind that had soaked up twenty years of overflowing sewage from the men’s bathroom, coffee, dropped fast food, and your typical radio station decay—as he ran full tilt, baseball cap turned backwards.
He never asked why we were doing it.
He just trusted me enough to know it would be stupid in a way that mattered.
Bret looked like the scruffier, slightly Snot-version of Dante Hicks, but carried himself like Silent Bob—quiet, resigned, unbothered no matter how stupid the situation was.
But if you knew him well enough, you also knew he could melt down like Dante discovering his girlfriend had sucked 37 dicks—panicked, spastic, furious — but only in private.
In public, Bret kept it locked down like a pro.
That contradiction became one of our inside jokes, another unspoken part of working nights in a building that smelled vaguely like raw sewage and homeless people.
I panned dramatically up to his face.
The final shot is a close-up of him holding the scissors like a prize salvaged from a gas station claw machine.
Down the hallway, I set up a shot of him revving up to run toward the camera—a starting gun fires, and there’s a montage of him sprinting from the starting line, tearing down the hallway, then a rear-view shot of him rounding a corner, still clutching the scissors like some kind of Olympic torch.
It was all the kind of blatant workplace safety violation that should've gotten us fired.
At KUPD, it was just another Wednesday night.
Creating this one-minute piece was absolutely absurd—the kind of thing that made us laugh like two weed-smoking idiots who thought they had discovered a new color, only to realize it was just regular-ass beige. The funny part is that we never touched a blunt—we were just that stupid.
I set the whole video to some overly cinematic royalty-free music I found online, slapped a title card on it that said, "The Overnight Guy Runs with Scissors," and finished it off with the KUPD logo like we had just made a legitimate piece of station branding.
Nobody understood why we made it.
Nobody needed to.
That’s just what we did.
Other coworkers clocked out and went home to normal lives.
Bret and I stayed—running through sad, stained hallways with sharp objects—because somewhere deep down, we understood something most people didn’t:
In radio, and in life, survival isn’t about playing it safe.
It’s about finding someone just as willing to sprint into stupidity next to you.
Doing anything with Bret usually started the same way:
He'd sigh, act like he didn’t want to do it, and then go along with it anyway.
It always ended the same way too—with him muttering “Fuckin' Shannon,” like I had ruined his night and made his month at the same time.
Whether we were bellying up at some Old Town Scottsdale bar or wasting entire weekends playing Call of Duty online, Bret’s fake disappointment was never disappointment at all.
It was a compliment.
It was his way of saying, “Dude, thanks for the memory.”
Back then, we didn’t set out to make memories in the sense that you see in movies or a Netflix series.
We just conjured up whatever was presented in front of us and didn’t question the consequences.
Whether it was running with scissors down a hallway, hiking an empty keg up a mountain, or embarrassing the other person in the most awkward way possible, these were things we just did.
Not for the keepsake of a memory.
Not for some grand scrapbook of adulthood.
Just because we were dumb enough to say yes.
But life—or at least radio life—had a way of setting up bigger, dumber adventures whether you wanted them or not.
Which is how I eventually found myself on the phone with Bret, hungover, still half-drunk, both of us trying to piece together the night before in late 2017.
In the early part of 2017, word started floating around between the air staff that Larry McFeelie was planning a “team builder” for all of us.
The destination? Las Vegas, Nevada.
Now, keep in mind, I don’t think this was entirely Larry’s idea.
John Holmberg had gotten into the habit of making regular weekend trips to Vegas to gamble, and it was probably more John's idea than it was Larry’s.
But Larry—trying to accommodate both John and the rest of the (semi-)functioning adults on the air staff—must have figured Vegas seemed like the safest place to convene a bunch of radio personalities and their egos.
On one side, you had a group of air staffers absolutely ready to snap off a few nights of gambling in Vegas.
On the other side were me and Bret—two broke dicks wondering how we’d even be able to financially survive a trip to Vegas.
Well, at least I was thinking this. But I’m pretty sure Bret was too.
As the year wore on and we got closer to our November departure date, I had questions that weren’t getting answered:
Who was paying for airfare and hotel?
Do we get a meal stipend?
I wasn’t asking because I was hoping the company would pay for everything.
I was asking because I needed to know if I was about to get blindsided by another expense I couldn’t afford.
The answer finally came—and to be fair, it wasn’t nothing.
The company was covering round-trip airfare and hotel for two nights.
Everything else? On us.
Food.
Transportation.
Gambling.
Whatever miscellaneous bullshit that would inevitably pop up.
Basically, they were giving us a plane ticket and a bed—which, honestly, was pretty generous by radio standards—and then tossing us into a financial woodchipper like Vegas with a thumbs-up and a hearty, "Have fun, guys!"
Bret and I had the same reaction without even needing to say anything out loud:
We are so fucked.
At the time, I was barely clawing my way out from under a mountain of ancient credit card debt—not to mention the financial black hole that came with earning a Master's from the University of Phoenix—and now I was supposed to somehow bankroll a Vegas weekend to prove I was a "team player."
There was no stipend.
There was no per diem.
There was no company card.
Just blind optimism from management—and the thinly veiled expectation that we would all just figure it out. Because that's what good soldiers did in radio.
You showed up.
You smiled.
You crossed your fingers and hoped you didn’t have to put anything too humiliating on a credit card.
The day finally came.
Flying to Vegas with a bunch of radio personalities was like lighting a dumpster on fire, shoving it through TSA, and telling it to be in seat 23B by boarding group C.
Bret and I didn’t say much at the airport.
We didn’t have to.
Bret always had a way of keeping things light, even when they weren't.
He'd crack jokes, bust balls, and somehow make an expensive trip to Vegas feel like no big deal. It was a gift—pretending financial ruin was just another part of the itinerary.
Meanwhile, I was quietly doing mental math like I was preparing for bankruptcy court.
We both knew we were about to burn through money we didn’t have in the most pathetic way possible.
The plan was simple:
Land.
Get to the Mirage.
Dump our stuff in our rooms.
Try to act like we weren’t already exhausted.
Then meet up for the first official "team building" event—dinner at some swanky restaurant someone had picked inside the hotel.
The only problem was getting there.
Boarding the flight was absolute chaos.
It was like trying to load a clown car full of radio egos—everyone cracking jokes, busting chops, trying to one-up each other before we even left the ground.
Holmberg led the charge, of course, treating the boarding area like his personal roast stage.
We weren’t all sitting together, but we were close enough to heckle each other across the rows—loud enough that the flight attendants kept giving us the same tired look usually reserved for frat boys and minor celebrities who refuse to wear shoes.
At one point, someone started teasing Bret about something—I don't even remember what—and in true Bret fashion, he just deadpanned, pulled out his phone, and started casually scrolling through porn like we were in his living room instead of Southwest Airlines, Flight 183 to Las Vegas.
No shame. No explanation. Just another Friday.
Meanwhile, the rest of the flight from Phoenix to Vegas was absolute chaos.
Eric—already halfway to blackout—kept screaming and making some kind of scene, probably because he was either drunk or just committed to the bit of embarrassing all of us as loudly as possible.
Flight attendants gave us the kind of looks usually reserved for bachelor parties gone wrong and minor local celebrities who refused to wear shoes.
I wish I could’ve been that relaxed.
Instead, I kept telling myself it would be fine.
That maybe I'd find something halfway affordable on the menu.
That maybe I'd gut it out with the quiet grit of a guy who once thought getting a Master’s degree from the University of Phoenix was a smart financial decision.
I should have known better.
Vegas doesn’t do halfway affordable.
Vegas does $25 waters, charges the air you breathe and "Would you like to add truffle shavings to your hamburger for an extra $75?"
By the time the plane touched down and the blast of dry, neon-soaked Vegas air hit me in the face, I already felt broke.
We pulled up to the Mirage valet and I could feel my credit card weeping from the inside of my wallet.
This wasn’t going to be a weekend getaway.
It was a controlled financial implosion disguised as a team-building exercise.
We stumbled inside with the rest of the air staff, everyone pretending this was normal—like we took expensive trips all the time and weren’t just gambling away our rent money in slow motion.
Checking in gave me instant anxiety.
Even though the company had promised to cover the room charges, we still had to put down personal credit cards for "incidentals"—and my card wasn’t just maxed out, it was somewhere in that terrifying credit limbo where you're basically waiting for a collections agent to show up wearing brass knuckles.
The Mirage front desk lady smiled like she’d seen a thousand desperate idiots just like me before noon.
I handed over my card with a shaky hand, half-expecting it to burst into flames on contact. Somehow, by the grace of whatever financial gods govern sad radio personalities, it went through.
I mumbled a thank you I didn’t really mean and tried not to think about the mini-bar.
The company had warned us not to abuse anything in the room—no minibar raids, no pay-per-view porn marathons, no mysterious $85 bottles of Fiji water magically appearing on the bill.
Even the tiny bottles of water sitting on the dresser felt like booby traps.
One wrong move, one accidental nudge, and I'd be out another $25.
I treated the whole room like it was wired with explosives—like some low-budget Lethal Weapon remake where I was both Riggs and Murtaugh, too broke to call the bomb squad and too stubborn to leave.
I didn't touch anything unless absolutely necessary.
I barely even sat on the bed like a normal person.
I perched on the corner like I was squatting in someone else's house, waiting to be evicted.
Welcome to Vegas.
After tossing our stuff in our rooms and pretending everything was fine, we met up downstairs for dinner inside the Mirage.
It was one of those sleek, expensive hotel restaurants where the lighting was dim enough to feel "exclusive" and the menus were fancy enough that they didn’t even bother describing the food properly.
Just one word:
“Halibut.”
“Beef.”
“Heritage.”
Like you were supposed to instinctively know what $65 of "Heritage" was without asking.
We all crammed around a huge circular table—John, Larry, Fitz, Rich, Brady, Eric, Bret, me—everyone laughing, trading jokes, ordering drinks like this was some normal thing we all did on a regular basis.
It wasn’t normal.
Not for me and Bret.
We sat there quietly doing the kind of broke-guy math that makes you feel like you’re studying for the SATs in real time.
You could tell who was comfortable.
They were ordering appetizers without blinking, ribeyes without checking the price.
Meanwhile, Bret and I were scanning the menu like we were trying to defuse a bomb, praying to find something—anything—under $30.
The only thing that came remotely close was a Caesar salad.
And even that wasn’t safe.
I don't remember exactly how much it cost—somewhere around $30 or $40 for a plate of lettuce with two croutons and a drizzle of dressing.
It wasn’t even a real meal.
It was what you ordered when you wanted to signal to everyone else at the table,
"Hey, I'm participating, but please don’t notice I’m financially dying inside."
Bret ended up ordering something equally depressing—I think pasta, maybe.
Neither of us said it out loud, but the message was clear:
Survive the dinner. Escape with dignity.
Meanwhile, Fitz—being Fitz—started ordering like he had just hit a jackpot nobody else knew existed.
Foie gras, duck fat something, "Heritage" mystery meat.
He ordered foie gras like it was a side of fries.
No hesitation. No shame.
Just a casual, "Yeah, I’ll take the foie," like we were all sharing a $5 appetizer at Applebee’s.
Nobody else touched it.
It just sat there in the center of the table, sweating under the restaurant lights, slowly leeching $75 of regret into the atmosphere.
Fitz, meanwhile, looked like he had ascended to a higher plane of existence.
He kept raving about how he'd eaten foie gras before, how it "melts in your mouth," how it was "an experience."
And then he just went for it—licking his fingers, smacking his lips, humming under his breath like he was physically incapable of experiencing shame.
Bret and I didn’t say anything.
We didn’t have to.
We just exchanged one of those silent broke-guy looks that basically translated to:
"We are about to split the cost of a luxury goose liver neither of us can spell, afford, or morally endorse."
I sipped my water, gnawed through my $40 sadness salad, and tried to look like I belonged there.
Like I wasn’t panicking inside.
Like this was a thing I did all the time—drop half a paycheck on leaves and tap water for the sake of “team building.”
Everyone else was having a great time.
Laughing, drinking, ordering another round like it was nothing.
I think I had a small glass of wine somewhere in there—just enough to feel like less of an outsider, not enough to drown out the low-grade financial panic buzzing behind my eyes.
Bret kept it together the way he always did.
Cracking jokes, trading shots with the rest of the table, making it look easy.
But sitting next to him, I could feel it—the same quiet dread humming under the surface.
The small glances at the menu.
The slight wince every time someone ordered something insane without even looking at the price.
The silent mental math both of us were doing in real time.
He never complained.
He never made it awkward.
He just handled it—with the kind of quiet resignation you only learn from years of working the overnight shift, years of knowing exactly how much it costs to pretend you belong somewhere you can't actually afford.
As the plates cleared and the conversations shifted toward what to do after dinner, none of us were fully prepared for the nightmare about to drop in front of us:
The bill.
And not just any bill—
A bill that could've easily paid for a used Honda Civic with questionable brakes.
It hit the table with a soft thud, like a warhead.
There was this unspoken moment where everyone just kind of looked at it, pretending not to be fazed.
Then the fake casualness kicked in:
"Oh yeah, just split it, whatever..."
"I'll throw in cash..."
"Just add a tip on top..."
Mind you, this was before restaurants routinely split checks.
This was analog chaos:
Cash being dumped into the middle of the table like it was a hostage negotiation.
At first, it seemed like it might actually work.
People tossing twenties and fifties in, laughing, not really paying attention.
Then the counting started.
Larry or maybe Rich—it all blurs—started sorting the piles, doing the math.
And it was short.
Like, really short.
Somewhere between the foie gras, the duck fat, and whatever the hell "Heritage" cost, we were missing a few hundred dollars.
Rich, being the responsible dad-figure he was, started recounting everything.
Trying to audit a table of drunk radio people with nothing but a pile of crumpled bills and blind optimism.
Eric, who had already been halfway to blackout since the airport, got pissed off during the process.
Accused someone of screwing him over.
He tossed his crumpled bills down like he was paying off a drug dealer he didn’t respect, and stormed off into the casino like a man who had finally reached his breaking point over duck fat and injustice.
In the end, those of us still standing had to chip in even more.
Bret and I didn’t even argue.
We just tossed our credit cards into the little black folder like two guys surrendering in a war they knew they’d already lost.
Everyone else casually dropped crumpled cash on the table, laughing, joking, already planning where to lose even more money later that night.
We sat there quietly, watching the server scoop up the pile of bills and our sad, exhausted credit cards, disappearing toward the register like it was a death march.
No words.
Just the silent, shared understanding that whatever came back—even if it cleared—was still going to cost us more than we wanted to admit.
Across the table, Fitz was finishing off the foie gras like he was cashing a winning lottery ticket, while Bret and I sat there trying to figure out if we had enough left on our credit cards to get a cab back to Phoenix.
As we stumbled away from the restaurant toward the blinking lights of the casino floor, Bret and I gave each other a look—the same one we always gave when life came at us sideways.
"How did we end up splitting the cost of a luxury goose liver neither of us touched?"
There was no answer. There never was.
This was Vegas. This was radio. This was life.
We weren’t trying to win anything. We were just trying to lose slower than everybody else.
After dinner, it wasn’t about paying bills. It was about apologizing to strangers and hoping nobody filmed it.
Spoiler: I was the idiot who filmed it myself.
To be continued…
Stay tuned for Part 2 where we hit an off-the-strip bar, Pantera’s Vinnie Paul makes a cameo and Liberace’s mansion is what happens when you build a palace in a neighborhood where the ice cream truck accepts Venmo.
See you next week!
-Shannon
Like what you just read? High five your bad life choices and do me a solid.
📬 Subscribe to the newsletter—free or paid. Share it with anyone who’s ever fake-laughed through a $70 dinner salad or considered putting hotel mini-bar waters on Afterpay.
Feeling dangerous? Become a Monthly Booster and help keep the essays coming, the minibar sealed, and the financial trauma mildly hilarious.
Just want to throw a one-time tip into the chaos jar? You can do that too. It keeps the lights on and fuels future bad decisions.
📤 Or just smash that share button below and send this to five friends who have definitely yelled “IT’S FINE” while panicking inside a casino.
Supporting this work means less existential dread for me—and more absurd true stories for you.
Thanks for reading. You made it to the bottom. That's basically a Vegas victory in itself.
