It all started a couple of weeks ago when our chef decided to join in our nation’s collective outrage and banish french fries from our daily menu. You can imagine the uproar, for our employees depend upon a daily dose of Idaho spuds deep fried in liquid lard to provide all the vitamins and minerals needed to process tour itineraries, such as the new routing for Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony as well as the new dates for Boston and Enuff Z’Nuff. Yes, ketchup, salt and cholesterol makes for happy workers, and the day the deep fryers went silent was a sad day indeed at Pollstar.com.

Added to the misery was the annual rodent migration that takes place every spring as those pesky four-legged critters make their way down the San Joaquin Valley to their Bakersfield spawning grounds. While the migration never bothered us in years past, for the hideous creatures were always repelled by the sweet aroma of sizzling animal fat, this year the monsters swarmed over our compound and interfered with the daily processing of tour dates, including Dave Matthews Band, The Wallflowers and Third Eye Blind.

They were all over the place! They crawled up pant legs as our operators attempted to plug in new routings for Steve Winwood and Poison, they scrambled along the arms of our data entry people updating the schedules for Natalie Cole and Mark Knopfler and tickled the toes of our translators while they attempted to decode the often cryptic Canadianese language used to originally denote the dates making up the tour for Chantal Kreviazuk. We were doomed!

Or so we thought. For it was at the exact moment when the furry little devils had appeared to have had conquered our tour date operation that our chef had a brainstorm. He surveyed the mass of tiny squealing bodies, then he looked at all the inactive deep fryers and he came up with an idea that not only rid us of our pesky pests, but also satisfy our employees’ needs for deep fried munchies to fuel the processing of dates for all the acts from Avril Lavigne to ZZ Top.

Yes, all is well at the Pollstar.com compound. We’re no longer infested by rodents, plus we have enough deep fried munchies to see us through the week as we update the itineraries for Def Leppard, Heart and James Taylor. Furthermore, our workers really love their new taste treat and they can’t seem to get enough of our chef’s latest creation, which we like to call Mice Krispies.

In fact, you might even say our employees love the way they squeak, crackle and pop.