Usually we spend our weekends at the Pollstar.com retreat in the Cayman Islands. However, we were in the midst of upgrading our roadie servers last week, and the work spilled over into the weekend. Plus, our boss hired a computer consultant to oversee the upgrade. Man, talk about anal. I mean, he may be a true Internet pioneer, but he had us checking, double checking, then triple checking all the data.

Take the dates we have for America, for example. Not only did he make us check the geographical locations of each date, he even had us call Rand McNally. You know, “just to make sure their maps were correct.” Sheesh.

All weekend long, no matter if it was Social Distortion, Mission U.K. or Iron Maiden, he made us go through the same routine. Call the venues, check the maps, check the spelling. He even made us compute the mileage between shows for Kittie. Said he wanted to be sure that it was feasible for the tour bus to make it to each city without breaking the speed limit. “It’s all about conservation of energy,” he said. Yeah, right.

And to top it off, his wife came in and started complaining about some of the bands we list on Pollstar.com. Said we should look into each and every tour, like Prince, Pantera and Collective Soul for “objectionable lyrics.” She even wanted us to put stickers on some of the schedules. “Parental warnings,” she called them. Can you believe it?

Needless to say, it wasn’t the best of weekends. If we weren’t counting and recounting dates for Scarface and Queens Of The Stone Age, we were checking CDs by Meat Puppets, Insane Clown Posse and Andy Williams for naughty words. But it’s not over yet. The guy and his wife are still here, and we may have to put up with this crap all week.

Have you ever had someone who, despite all your hard work, kept making you check, and then recheck the results? Even though our boss hired this Internet pioneer, someone is going to have to do something. One of us is going to have to say what’s on all of our minds.

I mean, I wish one of us had the courage to tell the inventor of the Internet to go home.