Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Business is business...


 Now this is a fairly soft post, about a situation that I encountered in my time interning but I think it addresses an important point at the end...

Anywhere you go in life you are going to come across people you dislike for whatever reasons. There’s always been people you don’t get along with in school, people you don’t see eye to eye with in university when you are doing a group assignment, or even has just rubbed you up the wrong way at some stage or another in your however many years you spend studying. They could have even just pushed cut you off when you’re running for that last free computer in the library, whatever it is - it happens.

Now going in to this internship I thought I figured I would be dealing with generally like-minded people, but as always I was prepared that everything wasn’t going to be easy, and I’m going to have to deal with difficult people. I’m prepared for that, and I can usually handle it just by tying to be doing whatever needs to be done and just being understanding about the whole situation, they probably have their reason for being however they are.

Now from my last post I mentioned I am working within the music business, with a concert promoter. An industry that is notorious for big-egos and obnoxious, difficult people. Many of the people I have had to work with have been great, and speak to me as a real person.

For the last few weeks I have been working with the director of this company to organise and promote a tour for another international band. That was all pretty straight forward, he assigned me a few small roles, like announcing the event on the blog, managing the Facebook event page, getting in touch with the printers for getting the posters and flyers made. Those bits were easy. Before that however, when choosing the local support acts with him was the difficult part, more particularly dealing with one extremely difficult person...

So it turns out one of the people from the support bands didn’t see eye-to-eye over something else in the past. It was never really resolved, in fact never resolved at all. I was assigned the role of contacting him and asking if his band would be willing to play the event. From his first email back to me it was that same arrogant attitude I had dealt with previously. However now I’m in the real world, I’m representing a company. I had to bite my tongue and make this work. As much as I dislike the guy his band definitely would pull people to the show (I’m not going to mention his band name, for fear of him seeing it and creating a situation), they are one of the more popular local bands in this scene. However, business is business and his band agreed to play.

Again, I would love to post more information about the event on here because it’s going to be great, (however my time interning with the company will be up by then…) but given the situation and this is in public domain, it’s probably best we keep all parties anonymous for now…

1 comment:

Aniella Svensson Koufakis said...

It's hard when you encounter difficult people at work. I have also worked within the music industry and wow, big egos that's for sure! I think you have done the right thing though. As you said, you're representing your company, you need to stay professional. Very curious though who it is! Good luck!