Page 40 of Echoes of a Muted Song

“Dave! Hey, um, we’ve got a little problem.”

Seemed to me like this was Dave’s day for problems. I just hoped this wasn’t always the way things worked around here or the turnover rate had to be insane.

“Can’t you see I’m already dealing with a problem?” Dave groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“I don’t think this one is going to wait.”

Turning, I saw the man forced to step all the way into the office to make room for a cop who looked as annoyed as I felt.

“Sir, are you the manager?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Well, would you be able to give some sort of timetable for when your neighbors might expect to have the entrances to their establishments uncluttered by all of the people looking to get in here?”

“We were just discussing that.”

“Oh, well then don’t let me stand in yourway,” the cop replied, sarcasm dripping from his voice as he glared at Dave. “Please, go ahead and figure that out so I have something to tell them. Maybe then they’ll quit harassing my dispatcher to complain about people coming in and out to use their bathrooms and making it next to impossible for their customers to find the door, let alone get out.”

“I can’t control what people do on a public sidewalk.”

“That’s right, it’s a public sidewalk, which means that all of the public has the right to use it and right now they can’t because you have a line wrapping halfway around the block.”

Sighing, Dave rubbed the back of his neck and groaned. “Better than all the way around. Then we’d have two lines fighting to get in here with everyone arguing about who’s first.”

“Sir, what exactly is going on out here?”

“We’ve got a band in signing CDs and merchandise,” Dave explained.

“I see. Is there a way that we can move things along faster?”

“Dave was just about to explain why there is a much longer line than the one we were told to expect,” I conveyed.

“Well, um, what happened was that we had a band that was supposed to do a signing here last Saturday and they, um, well, they no showed with no warning, and we had all these people here and they were, well, rightfully pissed. Sowe offered to give them a store credit, plus five dollars if they wanted, or they could come back this week and we’d honor the tickets. We figured most would take the credit.”

Was he fuckin’ kidding me with this shit?

If there wasn’t a cop in the room I’d have been tempted to haul him across his desk and beat him with the stack of papers he kept fiddling with.

“Only they didn’t, did they?” I typed.

“No, um, only like, maybe twenty-five percent.”

“So we’ve got seventy-five percent more ticketed people in the line,” I conveyed, wanting to make sure I was understanding correctly. “That’s a hundred extra people. Are you out of your mind?”

I’d typedfuckingonly to hastily erase it. Seemed that I’d found at least one positive thing about having the damned device. It was way easier to censor myself when I could see what I was about to say, rather than blurting it out. When the cop chuckled, I knew I had an ally, not that I had a solution in mind for how to fix this. Sending staff and roadies outside to ask who had tickets for today and who had tickets for last week and culling those people from the line was a surefire way to lose fans. Clearly they’d thought enough of us to not take the store credit, which, at fifty bucks a pop, wasn’t exactly chump change in this economy. Those folks wereprobably salty already over the way they’d been treated by the band they’d bought tickets for. They’d be extra venomous online if we refused to sign for them. We couldn’t short our own fans, either. They were supposed to have time for photos and a moment or two with the band.

“I-I-I’m sorry,” Dave said. “I just followed corporate’s policy and those are the options they give.”

“But were they the only options, Dave?” I asked.

“W-well, no, n-not exactly, I-I mean, we could have offered cash refunds, but we didn’t have that kind of money on hand and I’d have had to get my district manager involved to try and get it and he was on this weekend retreat thing and basically threatened to…well, I need this job, so there was no way I was calling him so I dealt with it the way the manual said.”

“The manual has never had to go and tell their clients that they’ll need to stretch this thing out another two hours in order to take care of everyone,” I typed. “Pretty sure the manual has never tried to explain to your neighbors that they’re losing money because you didn’t bring in enough staff today to control your line. You should have security for that. Now, I’m going to do you and your neighbors a favor and send our roadies out to handle that so you don’t wind up in a feud with everybody on the block. But, Dave, do the world a favor and grow a set, so thatthe next time something happens that you need your district manager for, you’ll have the guts to get him on the phone!”

“Amen,” the cop muttered.

Even Christine snorted, just once, before she went back to silently observing what was taking place.

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