February has
only 28 days!
17.2.05 - Which is a complete bastard. Was it the same last year? Anyway, it just makes things even more difficult for a professional procrastinator - things that might just be late in your average month end up overlapping into the next month with this stupid arrangement. I know calenders are contentious - the Chinese have only just discovered that this is the New bloody Year of the bloody rooster for instance - but somebody with a bit of mathematical nous could've come up with a better system surely. Oh well, I suppose I'd better stop bitching and simply get on with it. But, bugger!

Mike's Pith & Wind - Professionalism
Provocative Events provoke unique responses, and the night Spectrum recently suffered hooked up to a sound meter (as mentioned in the February Stop Press) was certainly provocative, and our response to it may indeed have been unique. As it happens, I have to take responsiblilty for accepting the conditions under which we worked, but it’s my motives for doing so that I'm questioning. Perhaps too late in my career to make the slightest difference, but, you never know; the signs are that I could be up for a long life and it may actually benefit me to at least consider the problem even at this late stage.
For instance, if we were to be confronted with the same situation again, I'd reject the equation out of hand, (the equation being a comparatively well-paid gig for well-meaning and nice people, but in an inappropriate venue equipped with a bloody sound meter).
In this case I obviously thought that professionalism meant being obliging and easy to get along with. Because I was so obliging, so eager to please, so professional, I‘ll never know what the outcome might have been had I said that the working conditions were utterly intolerable and we wouldn't consider compromising our music that way. I suppose it's at least possible they might've actually decamped to another venue, thereafter (naturally) we would have blown the

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Professionalism - (cont.)
audience away and everyone would've been ecstatically happy - as usual. As it was, we were absolutely miserable and we may as well not have - I was going to say 'turned up' – and, in the end, absolutely nobody was impressed. We got paid, we got well paid, we we got well paid in advance,
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