I had one of those random acts of kindness experiences today that don’t happen often enough to keep people from becoming cynical and depressed, but obviously should.

I was having lunch with representatives of the rental car company I use to provide transportation for my performers. (Like I said yesterday, I ain’t letting any moss grow on my planning for next year.) I had some complaints about the service we had received last year and these folks wanted to make sure they had a handle on them since the corporate accounts rep was moving on to another job.

The young woman who was serving us was right on top of everything and really charismatic. I commented to my companions that today was the fastest I had ever been served in that restaurant. We told the server that we were impressed with her and she confessed that she actually thought she wasn’t doing as well as she should because she had been working 10 days straight and was on call for tomorrow. She had the classic story. Pre-med taking a semester off to save enough money for next year when she wouldn’t have time to work.

When we finished our meal, one of the rental car folks walked up to the kitchen door, waited for the young woman to emerge, gave her the tip directly and offered her a job.

I guess the act of kindness wasn’t so random since the young woman certainly earned the recognition. I thought it was a great thing to do as a compliment to the woman for her hard work. Also, if you see someone providing the type of service you have just spent an hour assuring a client they will receive, it is a smart move to try to grab the person.

As the years have gone by since I started in the performing arts I have come to realize that the level of professionalism and conscientiousness I once assumed everyone was devoting to their jobs isn’t as common as I thought. Part of the discussion I had with my assistant theatre manager yesterday skirted the edge of groveling with gratitude for the job she has been doing. Ten/fifteen years ago, I would have taken her attentiveness for granted as something all people in her position would naturally do.

Now I know better. So too, I imagine, do you my loyal readers. It will be with some regret that I remove her name from our website tomorrow morning. She deserves the recognition of working here. But if laboring in obscurity is the price she has to pay so I can keep you all from stealing her away from me, I am willing to have her pay it.

Saturday was the end of our season for all intents and purposes. We have a couple inhouse events and scads of rentals, but the days of meeting people at the airport and seeing them safely to the hotel are over for awhile.

I planned on diving in to final grant reports and catching up on paperwork pushed aside when the office manager broke her hip. Amidst doing all that though I ended up in conversations planning for next year.

The last two days have been, despite my earlier intentions, a series of discussions about the next season. I have been in contact with the new development person stating my desire to form a unified plan for fundraising over the year to be reflected in speeches and publications.

I suggested that next month’s meeting of my booking consortium include proposals of performers for the next two years in preparation for the state foundation’s biennium grant proposal process.

I got into a long conversation with the assistant theatre manager enjoining her to think how we can improve customer service, volunteerism, our publications and website. We have made some good progress in customer service, but given people’s expectations, we have some areas of improvement.

I also discussed how I envisioned how the integration of information sources we have been slowly effecting in our database will hopefully serve to increase our attendance next season (and therefore, is what we needed to work on the next few months.)

As I have gone through the last two days, all the memories of all the small corrective actions I took over the past year came back to me. They were accompanied by recollections of all the mental notes I made to formulate policies to turn the small actions and comments into documented instructions for practices.

One thing I gotta solve and maybe some of the readers can help with some advice. One of the recurring events that I think I need to address is that people often call, hear we charge $2 handling fee on advance sales (vs the fees of many names Ticketmaster levies) and say they rather come the night of the performance.

Part of the problem is our performances don’t approach capacity in advance so there is no perceived downside for our audience. If they show up early enough for a general admission show, they can get tickets and good seats.

The fee itself is mainly to cover the credit card charge and to help pay for the clerk who seems to be sitting around doing less and less as time goes on. We can either raise the price across the board so everyone pays for the person covering the advance sales for the dwindling group of folks who want to talk to someone when they order tickets vs. buy them online or we can just cut the ticket office hours to the week before the performance which is when most people who are calling in advance or walking up are contacting us.

The question we need to answer is if it is returning ticket buyer who is purchasing in advance and will we alienate them if we cut our hours back to reflect the period when demand exists. We actually forward the phones to our office and staff them fairly consistently throughout the year until two weeks, and now perhaps one week, prior to a show when the increase in calls becomes too much of an interruption.

To add a complication, if we are only employing a ticket office clerk a week prior to a performance, it becomes more difficult to find someone willing to work so infrequently. I suspect we are simply caught in an awkward transition of technology period where there are just enough people who haven’t adopted a new technology to make discounting the old system unwise from a relationship standpoint, but so few it makes continuing unwise from a financial standpoint.

I am contributing to Drew McManus’ 2006 Take A Friend To The Orchestra Month . I took some friends yesterday and have been pondering throughout the day. Instead of making an entry today, I will be working on my contribution.

In the meantime, take a gander at today’s contribution by Alex Shapiro which seems to have elicited some good responses.