You Can't Use The Back Door

There's a sentence I don't find myself saying often. But you do what you must when working a very busy, very difficult Live R&B event at work. I don't even know who the headliner was, some rising star at Atlantic Records, but enough people did to swamp the front door and guest list areas to create a huge backlog. The Fire Marshalls and police showed up to warn us about blocking pedestrian traffic. The front door people, not used to such an aggressive crowd, were challeneged to say the least. And one of the other managers was pretty much reduced to tears. That's been happening with her more and more lately, and I'm concerned she's just about at the end of her rope, work-wise.

As for me, I put in a 16 hr. shift, as I now need to come in Tuesday during the day to accommodate our new financial managers. Payroll needs to be done and filed by Tuesday afternoon. I followed that with a full management meeting with all departments and the owners. That was the first full meeting we've had since we opened. You can decide for yourself how silly that seems. Then I went straight in to preparations for the R&B concert. I originally planned to leave right after the headliner took the stage, biut there were so many problems I was unable to extricate myself. Shortly after the concert began I was walking back by the corporate offices and spotted about 10+ people coming up the back stairs. When I inquired what they were doing I got a litany of excuses, the most popular being they were part of or with one of the bands. I made a half-hearted attempt to stop them, knowing I wasn't going to try to push 10 people back down a flight of stairs and out the door. But I had to at least make them work for it.

I rightly deduced that someone at some point had figured out we had a security issue at the back entrance and was using it to funnel guests past the guest list as well as the door cover charge. So I took up a position at the top of the stairs between the backstage and the corporate ofiices and basically shut down the shenanigans. I was wildly unpopular, as people soon realized that almost no excuse was going to get you free run of the back entrance. At least until one of the party promoters came to me and let me know she needed to bring in some big shot executive from Geffen records and a guest. For him, my back door was magically re-opened.