I was working a show yesterday over at The Peddie School. Shortly after the first song started, my contact walks in and says, “I’m going to take the board for a minute. You need to go outside. Someone just hit your van.” I thought he was joking, of course. “No, I’m serious. I guess maybe it was one of the construction vehicles or something. The security officer is outside waiting for you.” I had parked in a parking lot right in front of where they’re doing construction on a new building, so I had this horrible image of my van with a backhoe sticking out of the front. So I walk over to the parking lot.

What had, in fact, happened was that a girl had tried to park in the lot and had managed to hit my van. With another van. She was not driving a van. Let me explain…

She tried to park in a spot two spots over from my van. In the process of doing this, she managed to hit the van parked next to mine. When she panicked and went to hit the brake, she apparently gunned the gas pedal instead, thereby pushing the van next to mine into the side of my van. It actually did very little damage to my van. The other one, however, did not fare so well. They actually had to get a jack and lift that van up and move it to the side in order to seperate it from my van.

Anyway, the girl was very apologetic and her mother was very nice and said that of course she’d pay for any damages. It was more humorous to me than anything else, although this is exactly the sort of thing that I’ve come to expect in my life. Maybe that’s why I can laugh at it…

Damn you, George Lucas. First you made me not be excited about your new movie by making the first two kinda suck, which made me angry. Now, through all of your marketing and a promise that maybe this new movie will be good, you have managed to make me get excited about it again. If you let me down, Mr. Lucas, there will be hell to pay. If this movie is bad, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine, and strike you down.

I had an unfortunate first experience tonight. For the first time since I founded Reid Sound in 1999, someone has stolen some of my equipment. It wasn’t a lot, just a couple of microphones, but it amounts to a few hundred dollars worth of stolen goods. It’s a sort of odd feeling. I mean, I guess I am overly trusting sometimes, sometimes to the point of being naive, but in my mind when I go and set up a show, I expect the equipment to be there when I get back. Up to this point, it always has been. Now I’m going to have to start being more paranoid.

Of course, for me, this really doesn’t turn out too terribly. Besides the inconvience, I don’t lose anything. The client signed a contract and they are responsible for any theft that occurs, so they are obligated to reimburse me for the missing equipment. What actually bothers me more than anything is the effect this has on my client. I already know that they don’t even have enough money in their budget to pay me for the services I’m providing, and that they intend to have a fundraiser just to have enough money for that. Now I’ve got to hand them another bill just because some jerk was so inconsiderate as to take things that didn’t belong to him. It’s heartbreaking, because this is just another thing in a long string of abuses that my client has had to put up with in the course of trying to do something good for her community. I honestly wish I could just say that it was fine, and that I would absorb the cost. I can’t, though. I have to go there tomorrow and hand her a bill for something that was entirely not her fault, and simply add insult to injury. It’s a shame that she has to become the victim here. And it’s unfortunate that I cannot go on living in a fantasy where people can always be trusted…