We’re scared. We’ve been hiding in a secret location on the Pollstar.com campus since early this morning. There’s a behemoth out there, a genuinely scary monster that came to our compound to look at tour dates and kick butt. And he’s read all of our routings, including Bryan Adams, Steely Dan and Michael W. Smith. Now he wants a piece of us.

What we’re talking about is what lies beyond our front door. We’re talking about the giant shrimp.

Everyone knows that giant shrimps are the biggest concert fans on the planet. So we weren’t too surprised when one showed up at our offices this morning right after we posted additional dates for “Weird Al” Yankovic. Over ten stories tall and weighing in at around 35 tons, he wasn’t the biggest giant shrimp we ever saw. After all, living in a major seaport community such as Fresno, we’ve become accustomed to such monstrosities. But he was the largest shrimp ever to visit Pollstar.com.

The first thing he wanted to do was check on those Phish dates coming up at Camden, New Jersey. Then he insisted that we show him the dates for both Fishbone and Hootie & The Blowfish. But that wasn’t enough for him. He monopolized our guest workstation, the one we keep in reserve for whenever friends drop by with an urge to process tour data, and started calling up listings for Reel Big Fish and Trout Fishing In America. Sure, having a gigantic shrimp in your office is distracting, but we really didn’t mind until we were up to our elbows in brine. That’s when we realized that something had to be done about our colossal crustacean visitor.

So we invited him to lunch at the Pollstar.com commissary. We made it a special occasion by having our floor-to-ceiling flat screen displays list the dates for Lake Trout and Vince Gill. Yes, everything was going quite swimmingly until the chef told the shrimp about the special of the day. That’s right, surf & turf.

Now we’re hiding from a vengeful gigantic shrimp. He’s out there, somewhere, biding his time waiting for us to attempt an escape. And to make matters worst, he’s cut off all electricity to our main building, leaving us huddled in the blackness while we shake in our collective boots. And while we’re hoping that we can hold out until tomorrow morning, some of us are not too sure we’ll be around when the sun rises. Because sitting in a windowless room with no electricity while a gigantic shrimp waits outside is no laughing matter. Plus, the nights are getting longer.

And as you probably already know, it’s always darkest before the prawn.