The Living Centrifuge

Yes! I'm a performer, and we performers are always desperate for work. I signed up for a web-based service that posts auditions. From the time that I signed up, the company grew and apparently prospered, restructuring their services several times. In January of this year, they required some sort of response to some post or other to continue membership. I didn't really read those postings, and got booted. However, because I don't really read those postings, I didn't know what was going on. So, I sent them an e-mail saying, "Oops! For some reason, I can't log on. Can you help me out?" I got a snarky response to the effect of "Well, if you had READ the postings, you'd know that we're doing this purge!" "Okay" I said to myself, "don't get angry with stupid people. You have done administrative work too, and you know how thankless it can be", so I wrote back, "Oh, that's my mistake, here's all the information you require of me. Just out of curiosity, what information were you looking for by doing this purge? In any event, I hope you found what you were looking for." Then, I got a massively bitchy message, saying that I had no right to be so rude (!), to which I resoponded that misunderstandings occur when tensions run high (for example, when you re-structure your services), but that is no reason to treat me so poorly, and that respect is a two way street, and if they want people to be friendly, they should definitely not attack their clients outright. The response I received was that respect is indeed a two way street, therefore my account was in suspense, and my correspondence was being sent to the executive director. Fantastic. At this point, it was more of an outrageous game than anything else: if I remained completely civil, but firm, how horribly could these people treat me? Quite horribly it turned out. The executive director actually yelled at me over the course of the next few days in her e-mails (going to the trouble of caps locking her entire messages, italicizing and bolding several passages, and using a multitude of different colours for the text, primarily red. She then accused me of refusing to understand the intentions of her e-mails. Heh). I got unceremoniously kicked off this service. We parted ways, both secure in the knowledge that the other wouldn't survive treating theatre people in the way we had been treated in this encounter. "Theatre people never forget", we both thought.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from this company. It was a form letter, so I thought, "Wow, that's a blast from the past", and sent them a message saying they needed to update their mailing list, because we had parted ways several months ago.

Then I got another one.

I looked a little closer, and saw that although this was a form letter too, it was in fact, not directed toward current members, but was a solicitation! This evil company is wooing me! YES!!!! I sent another e-mail, saying (always in a very professional manner) that my inbox was too full to be receiving solicitation from companies with which I would not like to liase, and to remove me from their mailing list. I am hoping a little that they send me more messages, and that I get to continue being fabulous at their expense. I'll keep you updated.....