And it was such a great agenda! We were going to start off by announcing how everyone at Pollstar.com had sworn off the booze and kicked the nicotine habit. We were going to have all of our employees testify about how their lives are much better off since they gave up their morning Scotch & Marlboro breaks, as well as our tradition of whoever smokes the most cigarettes in one day getting to tap the afternoon Guinness keg. Yes, not only are we clean and sober, but we also smell good. Once you take a good deep breath while you’re inspecting the latest dates for Toots & The Maytals and Natalie Cole, you’ll agree that our workers smell like no other employees anywhere.

And we had planned on announcing that we had established a zero-tolerance policy in regards to violence in the workplace. We had this special Quicktime movie that we were going to show you, depicting the violent acts in our past, like eye-gouging for primo parking spaces, or those rare occasions when someone in management would rip out half of an employee’s colon if they arrived late to work, leaving the tardy worker with only a semi-colon. Plus, there were always those friendly rounds of bare-knuckle boxing that we held in order to decide who would get to update the schedules for Lake Trout and Kottonmouth Kings. But alas, that fell through as well.

Of course, no declaration of a safe and sane work environment would be complete without announcing that we were banning instances of on-the-job sex. We were going to announce that we would no longer tolerate our workers grabbing quickies behind the Dumpster or getting too touchie-feelie in the server room. Instead, we had planned on announcing that all of us at Pollstar.com had taken an eight-to-five vow of celibacy, citing that ageless platitude about how it’s not wise to buy a cow if the quill came from the company inkwell. After all, when you’re busy cramming in dates for Chris Robinson and Jose Feliciano, who has time for the nasty?

Yeah, we were all set to tell you that we had cleaned up our act, and that we were now walking the straight and narrow. We were going to boast that we no longer smoked, drank, coveted, lusted or rusted. We were going to brag that from now until the end of time we were going to be a lean, clean, tour-date machine, dedicated to managing dates for artists like John Mayer and bands like Umphrey’s McGee and Van Halen. Yep, we had big plans for today.

That is, until one of our employees pointed out that April Fool’s was yesterday. Oh, well, maybe we’ll get it right next year.