It’s no secret that we had some problems with our servers over the weekend. Problems such as dates for Maxwell disappearing and then reappearing, the baffling listing of Bob Dylan co-headlining with Britney Spears and the link to Ted Nugent’s official Website mysteriously redirecting users to Peta.org. Yes, it was a weekend for the record books, and it’s all Willie’s fault.

Willie is our chief Webmaster, a genius who can code pages, such as the ones listing the dates for Fu Manchu, Melissa Etheridge and LL Cool J, like no other programmer in the biz. That’s why the 9,391 individual computers that make up our server farm respect Willie, for deep down in their memory chips, the machines know that Willie is the only one that can tame the savage, unpredictable beast that is the Pollstar.com concert data core. That is, when he’s here.

But Willie had to go out of town for a few days, and while the chief’s away, the servers do like to play. After Willie left, our intranet wasted no time hooking up with our extranet and together they conspired with our custom-designed hairnet to indulge in a little silicon-based hanky panky.

It would be an understatement to say that the servers took advantage of Willie’s trip out of town They launched their mischievous plans for chaos as soon as we locked up our doors, turned out the lights and activated the electrified fences on Friday. Yes, while innocent Pollstar.com users looked up the weekend schedules for bands like Coal Chamber and Moonraker, our servers were sending 715,423 double-cheese pizzas to WeightWatchers.com, putting Napster back online and making endless calls to a Beijing tobacco shop and asking whomever answered if they had “Prince Albert in a can.”

But all the digital chicanery is about to come to an end, for Willie is scheduled to return sometime today, and already the servers have started to clean up their act and are once again properly displaying the dates for Belinda Carlisle, Galactic and Tuatara. Yes, Willie is the only programmer worthy of their respect, and when he gets back in town, he’s going to lay down the law on those dastardly denizens of digital depravities. You better believe that they’ll be singing a different tune once Willie comes marching in.

That is, as soon as his parents bring him back from summer camp.