Another week I think that I want to give up on Open Mic Night. It’s more hassle than it’s worth, people demanding to play and their friends demanding that I bump them up the order. Obviously I wasn’t having any of it, and one guy kept on disturbing other people’s sets despite having his 20 minutes earlier in the night. I got it all night from people, everyone knows how Open Mic works, they speak to the organiser and they either ask if a time slot is available or get added to the end of the current list of people wanting to play. When people say to me that’s not how it works and the previous organiser just allowed people to get up on stage and play totally ignoring the queue, some people patiently waited upto two hours, it wouldn’t be fair to allow other people to play before them. You wouldn’t walk straight to the front of the queue in a post office or some other public place where queuing is normal, so why should it be any different on Open Mic Night. I know for a fact that the previous organisers ran it in exactly the same way as I do now. In reality I shouldn’t be organising the night, I am employed as a sound engineer, and I shouldn’t have to deal with this shit week in, week out! I could have very easily have lost my temper tonight if I had been drinking, but I stayed away from the booze all night; collected my wages and left for home, I had enough stress for one night. Also as an observation it’s amazing how normally nice people turn into assholes when drunk, arguing with me isn’t going to work as I am stone cold sober. It brings us back to the old saying “never argue with an idiot, they’ll bring you down to their level and beat you with their experience.”
The other thing that has bugged me today is the proposal that everyone should be an automatic organ donor in an opt out style system. If you did nothing your organs could be harvested after death for transplant against your wishes. So you would need to actively opt out of the so called “presumed consent” system. This has to be a breach of civil liberties, we will no longer have control over what happens to our bodies unless we opt out. Although I am not necessarily against my organs being used to help someone else survive after my death. I am worried that if I was in an accident and the doctors thought that I was too badly injured to survive, would they sacrifice my potential survival chances to help someone else who needs a transplant? In this country we are slowly losing control over our identity, being watched constantly and with these biometric passports/ID cards being phased in soon, they are now proposing that we shouldn’t have control over our own bodies!