That is, did you miss us when we went on vacation? Actually, we almost didn’t go on vacation. We were concerned that something might happen, like George Strait releasing his new tour dates, or Toby Keith adding new shows to his schedule, and, well, we were worried that something might go wrong. What with us being out of the office and all.

To tell the truth, we didn’t want to go on vacation. In fact, we’ve never, ever taken a vacation before. But the bean counters in personnel discovered that we had all this vacation time accrued and insisted that we take some time off. Well, “insist” isn’t exactly the word for it. They had to pry our fingers from our keyboard and drag us kicking and screaming from our workstation to the airport. After all, when you spend every waking moment entering dates for bands like April Wine and artists like Doc Walker and Sting, every day is a day in paradise at Pollstar.com. So who needs a vacation?

But they threw us on a plane bound for the Big Island, where they expected us to chill for a while on one of Hawaii’s famous beaches. Guess they figured we needed a time out, some personal time where we could unwind amidst the sand, surf and sunshine and forget about keeping up with the tour schedules, like the new listing for K-OS or the changes in the Dokken routing. Guess they felt that we needed to get away from it all.

But they were wrong! The sand got in our eyes, the surf was way too wet and the sun did nothing but burn our sensitive tush. We were born for this job. We were meant to spend each day, week after week, year after year, sitting in front of a glowing, monochrome monitor slamming in schedule after schedule. John Scofield, Keith Urban, John Fogerty – We live for their dates, and we couldn’t cope with all that paradise had to offer. WE WERE MISERABLE!

So we begged. And then we pleaded. And then we begged some more. And finally, we convinced our personnel director to put us on the next plane back to good ol’ Fresno, CA, where we found relief by entering the new dates for Richard Bona and Authority Zero. Guess vacations just aren’t for us. What’s more, Hawaii just can’t hold a candle to our job of managing the largest, third-party tour database in the known universe. Maybe vacations are good for some people, but for us, separated from entering dates for Gavin DeGraw, The Tea Party and Col. Claypool’s Bucket Of Bernie Brains, Hawaii was pure, unmitigated hell.

In fact, not counting the time spent on the plane, our time in Hawaii was the longest five minutes of our life. Gosh, it’s great to be back.