A Very Pleasant Evening

[denny]

Just got home from my friendly Valentines evening with arachne, who very kindly took me out to see a comedy show at a venue I'd never heard of before. Apparently the Science Museum has an over 18s bar with all kinds of interesting events running in it - well worth checking out!

We had a good evening (comedy about sex and science), followed by organic pizza at some overly trendy place nearby, and then I wandered happily homeward.

Shame about the minor irritation on my way home:

To: info@thekeylondon.com
Subject: Bad publicity for your venue

Hi.  I live near Old Street tube.  My walk home takes me past a 
pub/gallery called The Foundry, which is on Old Street.

A couple of days ago I noticed a load of people doing various art 
(ranging from wildstyle graffiti to quite detailed paintings) on 
the scaffolding hoardings in front of the venue, whose building is 
currently being worked on.  They were obviously there with the 
venue's permission.  I thought it was a pretty cool idea, and 
there was some really nice work being done.

Tonight I just walked past The Foundry again, looking forward to 
seeing the finished work.  Instead, I find that it's all been 
destroyed, by people who were flyposting for your venue.

They've posted several posters straight on top of two or three 
of the hoardings with what had been almost completed works of 
art on them.  The Foundry have partially stripped the posters, 
but the art is totally destroyed, which is a real shame.  The 
bit of the poster that's left still shows your venue's name, 
so that means you're currently getting publicity that says 
something like "Hey, we're so incredibly rude and uncool that 
we thought it'd be funny to destroy all the hard work these 
other people did" - probably not quite the image you're looking
 for.

There are even some unpainted hoardings just a few metres away, 
but for some reason your guys chose to ruin the ones that had 
already been painted on instead.

I'm sure you probably don't care that much, and probably you just hired 
some firm of idiots who did this rather than doing it yourselves, but it 
still does reflect poorly on your venue and your credibility.  I cared 
enough to remember your venue name and the street it's on, then google 
for you when I got home and send you this email.  Most people probably 
won't bother with all that, but they may well remember your name in 
a negative way even if they don't remember why.

In my opinion, a nice thing for you to do at this point would be to 
contact the artists involved and apologise for ruining their work.  
I imagine you can get hold of them through The Foundry.

You might also want to offer to finish the job of stripping the posters, 
so your name isn't showing as 'the people who destroyed all the art' any 
more.

Finally, you might want to consider not hiring the same flyposting 
company in future - they don't seem very smart.

Regards,
Denny

In other news, I'm very tired all the time lately... I think it's partly my seasonal hibernating instinct, but mostly the mental effort involved in being manglement at work. It's all going really well so far, all crises have been handled as well as I could hope, but it still seems to be taking far more toll on my energy levels than I'd realised it would. More (or any) early nights required, I suspect.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

When I got minions, my company sent me on a 2-day junior-management training course, which I actually found quite useful.

[mr_magicfingers]

Very good letter, I hope you get a response. I was going to say I can't believe that someone did that, but sadly I can. Vandalism of the worst sort, destroying another person's art.

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

My guess would be that they thought "heh, kids! at least no-one's going to mind us sticking our crap up here".

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

Cool, good on you. :)

If you have the time

[djlongfella.livejournal.com]

Most Councils have a bye law afgainst flyposting, and invariably do actually have someone to dish out fines, worth a quick trawl of your council website, if youhave the time, probably under environmental services..From the heady days of running the Gauntlet here in Bedford, a larger of the clubs here was fined around 3k

Re: If you have the time

[altered-state.livejournal.com]

agreed, shop them!... does depend on the type of posters... sometimes clubs have got round it by claiming that they were unofficial posters put up by an unknown promotor or act in the line-up...

Re: If you have the time

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

Thirded. The fuckers!

Re: If you have the time

[djlongfella.livejournal.com]

That doesn't wash with the council these days, the club name being on them now means the club is responsible, as " we don't know who did it " was a get out for years.

[sevenhelz.livejournal.com]

take care of yourself.
*hug*