Sadly I've almost exclusively been GM and not a player, but I've had five GMs, none of whom ran games that lasted very long.
Round One:
The first, Chad, had been a player in my own game. We finished my campaign, and we had a summer before all of us were going to head off to college, so Chad decided to give GMing a try. Honestly, he really put his heart into it, but when the first adventure started off with us unconscious with amnesia, tied to a dry riverbed in a canyon with a huge dam looming over us, I knew odd things were going to happen. Then an NPC shows up and starts untying us, as the dam begins to open up, pouring out huge amounts of water.
Water filled with pirhanas!
Chad also had such crazy stuff as monkeys that had gone mad because of a temple in their jungle, so when we tried to pass through the jungle, the monkeys flung their diarhettic feces at us. Who knew that monkey poo could deal 1d3 points of damage?!
So yeah, it was a crazy game, and Chad wasn't the height of storytelling skill, but it was still fun. I just felt a little sorry for Chad afterward, because he was always embarrassed about how he'd done. He made us have fun, though, so that's what's really important. Nothing to be ashamed of there.
Round Two:
Next came Jessica, who took over after Chad grew too fed up to keep GMing. We only had about four weeks left in the summer, so the fact that Jessie managed to complete the entire Savannah Knights mini-campaign in a month is an impressive feat. You can read the storyhour
here.
Jessie was like me. She told stories more than she really ran games, so I had a blast in that game. The drama, the emotion, and the stunning twists were more important than relying on the rules, which was probably for the best, because we were playing the game in the summer of 2000, right before 3rd edition had come out, and all we had was the lot of rumors from Eric's site. We had to guess with a lot of things, but we still managed to make a good go of it. I think Jessie probably didn't know quite what she was doing, rules-wise, and she was very uncomfortable and self-conscious about that, but thankfully that didn't stop her from going at it with great gumption. And now her personal DMing style is almost more rules-intensive than mine.
Anyway, she was the first really good GM I've had for an extended period of time, but sadly we only gamed for a month. Well, it was fun while it lasted (*sighs at his own sad joke that the rest of you wouldn't get*).
Round Three:
Trae went to my college, and though he was just as self-conscious about his GMing as Jessie was, he took the opposite tack, going for extreme rules-lawyering, often at the expense of what I'd consider my "player's rights to coolness." It was definitely a change of pace from what I was used to, since I'd never really been in a game before that was so similar to Knights of the Dinner Table (and I would've been Sarah). Despite the pain I felt at the time whenever my efforts to do cool things were stymied by the rules, in hindsight it was refreshing, and it helped me better establish my identity as a GM.
Sadly, my poor gnome from that game, E.J. Whittlerswhistle, ended up blinded and lost in the Temple of Elemental Evil, with only his seeing-eye dachsund familiar to guide him. The rest of the party decided against heading back to town to get my magical blindness cured, and so I decided against returning to the game. Hopefully there were no hard feelings.
Round Four:
And now we get to Michael, who's crazier than I am. As a bit of backstory, he played in my game for a while, portraying Stanely Deadtree, follower of Zorok, the Three-Headed Chicken God of Everything. The fact that I didn't have a god named Zorok didn't impeded him, and so by the end of the campaign I was playing along with him, and even let him find a magical celestial roc egg that he thought would hatch into the messiah (it did).
So now I'm playing in Michael's game, playing a Dwarven warrior with a horrible Scottish accent. I used to hang out with Gnolls, though, and so I also speak their language, but when I do, I speak with a Japanese accent. Yes, I ended up coming up with this character after watching Samurai Jack.
In this game already we've had a treant named Smokey, who told us that only we can prevent forest fires, we've seen a kobold orgy and managed to use a joke about it to force the invisible wizard we were fighting to start laughing (which let us shoot fireballs at him and kill him), and we've nearly defeated the final villain by leaving him constantly teleporting higher and higher in mid-air to keep himself from splatting into the ground.
The great thing is, we should be able to play at least once every two weeks, for the next year and a half. It will be fun to be in a fun, long-term game for a change, even if the plot is a cliched "save the world from the badguys who want to destroy it." I love it.
Bonus Round:
And wow, how did I forget my first GM, my brother? Well, aside from the fact that he ended up becoming a total bum, when I was 8 years old, he was really cool. We played a Star Trek RPG, and my brother ripped off from "The Hunt for Red October" for the final game (a completely invisible Klingon ship that can fire while cloaked? I wonder if someone working on Trek6 was listening in on our games). The game actually played like a real episode of old Trek, since the only terrain my brother had us fight in were just big rocks that we could hide behind, and yes, the redshirts got zapped a lot.
After that he started a battletech game that he GMed, and now thinking back, . . . hmm. I remember him seemingly flirting with his best friend, in character. His friend Kody had decided to play one evening, and Kody's character ended up propositioning a barmaid. I got bored and left while my brother was discussing what was going on. Whew, I wonder how much that scarred me, since I was only 9 or 10 at the time.
Well, anyway, soon after that I started running my own game of Talislanta (with almost no rules) at a local summer daycare my mom had me stay at. And thus the path of my life was set.
Cheers Mark. I hope you, and everyone else here, has a nice GM's Day.
I think some games with no referee are a great idea! 
It wasn't too much later that Ed and I came in to replace some players that were leaving, and we stayed until the absolute latest that we could (damnable curfew!!!) and even got ourselves invited back to a wrap-up session at a later date at Games Plus! Now because of all of this I'm listed in the credits of a d20 project... it's a great feeling!
