Collateral Damage
Just last week, we got fired.
“We” in this case is the gig band: a distillate cluster of talented children enrolled in the free music school. Every Friday for some weeks, the gig band has appeared at a local restaurant. The band is paid a small stipend, which is split between payment for the children who graciously give over their Friday evenings to the band and payment to support the school itself. Last Friday, we lost the gig.
The reason we lost this gig might best be described as irrational. Though the band director (my partner) maintained a strong and positive relationship with the restaurant manager, last Friday the owner put in his first appearance. During the set-up, at the beginning of the gig, something went wrong. There is no need to waste time describing what went wrong, this is a children’s band running on a shoestring budget; small things go wrong.
The manager happed to see this thing go wrong, and he went ballistic. He immediately began laying verbal abuse about the head and shoulders of the school’s director and the children themselves. All attempts to calm him failed. We tried to contact the manager, to bring her in to mediate, but this only seemed to anger the owner all the more. The shouting escalated, culminating at last in a strict prohibition against the band ever appearing at the restaurant again.
Confused and exhausted, the band repacked their gear and went home, unpaid and unhappy.
It was only days later that we discovered, through the powerful spoke-word internet which enwraps all things on our little island, that some dispute had erupted just hours before our Friday gig between the restaurant owner an the manager. Peripheral to this argument, yet distinctly elemental to it, was a contest of will concerning the manager’s autonomy and her decision to hire a band on her own prerogative.
The loss of our gig was collateral damage of an unrelated war. Our only mistake was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is possible that a flawless set-up that night might have spared us the wrath of the restaurant owner, but that is arguable. Small business owners often suffer and thrive on the whims of disinterested, third parties. This is the kind of mistake that no owner can ever truly avoid as no owner can truly foresee, but it is a mistake nonetheless.
There is no lesson in the offing, except perhaps this: You will take knocks. They will be unfair. Live with it.
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