We know we’ve been moving a little slower than usual, and we’re sure you noticed it. Perhaps we were half-a-day late in posting the new dates for Porcupine Tree, or maybe we didn’t list the changes for Honeymoon Suite as fast as we usually do. But we have a good excuse this time, and no, it has nothing to do with taking too many Guinness breaks, or suffering too many injuries in our daily recreational rounds of bare-knuckle boxing during our lunch breaks. Oh, no. Instead, we have a perfectly legitimate reason for our tardiness.

You see, our best tour-date researcher just had a baby.

That’s right! A new life has just entered our collective lives of rooting out dates for Alanis Morissette, Mudvayne and Punk Rock Karaoke. Our best operator is now a mommy, and we’re sure you can understand that such a blessed event can slow down even the smoothest of operations. Instead of entering dates for John Waite and Flash Cadillac, she was timing her contractions, regulating her breathing, and, above all, concentrating all her efforts so that she could PUSH! PUSH!! PUSH!!!

Of course, the new mother is very lucky to be working for a company that pioneered corporate maternity care for employees. Even back in 1931 when our founder, Festus Pollstar, started this company with nothing more than a bottle of Bushmills and a handful of Glenn Miller dates, Ol’ Festus realized that good maternity care was a prerequisite for financial success. Yes, even back then Festus knew that it was never to early to scout out new workers, and he looked upon the offspring of his then-current employees as a steady supply of future Pollstar.com workers that would eventually be responsible for updating the schedule for Gavin DeGraw or plugging in new dates for the Nelson Brothers and James McMurtry.

And we’re reminded of that forward thinking as we wait for the happy mother to return from our onsite maternity ward. So, if the dates for Waddie Mitchell don’t appear on this Web site as quickly as they should, or if the updates for Luciano and Indigo Girls take a little longer than usual, all we can do is ask for your patience. The new mother will be back on the job as soon as she’s ready, and not a second sooner. Babies and motherhood come first at Pollstar.com. Always have, and always will. That’s because Festus would have wanted it that way.

But to tell you the truth, this slow-down in processing shouldn’t last much longer. You see, according to our payroll records, our employee / new mom punched out for lunch just as she went into labor, and according to the time clock, she should be back on the job in ten minutes. That is, if she decided to take the full hour.