Here’s an email I got this afternoon, at the end of a really crappy day—not-fun work things, compressed schedules, and several hours of meetings coming after finding out that my maternal grandmother fell, again, yesterday and is in the hospital with a brain bleed—that kinda set me off:

Subject: [Upcoming] (username redacted) sent you a note!

The note reads:

The address:
(address redacted) that’s under the name “Grace Free Evangelical Church is WRONG. The church at that address is my church, which is (church name redacted to protect innocent parishoners). Please get your facts straight, and please correct this. I don’t know why its saying I’m sending this from the email address “(redacted)”. That email has been deactived. Please email me back at (redacted, although I want to subscribe her to a lot of funky porn spam). Thank you.

Ummm … huh? Okay, so I made a mistake. Actually, I copied another person’s mistake—this was a venue for one of the artists for whom I enter data into Upcoming, and apparently, things changed, the address was wrong, or something. But anyway. Two things immediately struck me:

1. The tone. This young woman was angry that I had the wrong church at the right address. It’s a mistake—simply ask me to correct it and go on with life.
2. The utter lack of helpfulness. There’s no URL for the venue–and given how Upcoming has gone in the .org–>Yahoo.com transition, it’s a bit harder to search anymore. If given the venue’s URL, I could probably knock this problem out in about 30 seconds. I wasn’t, and after five minutes of fruitless searching, I gave up. [The tone had a lot to do with that.]

Here’s my response:

Would you shoot me the URL to the venue you complained about? That’ll help me get it corrected in the system.

As for the facts, I entered them from an artist’s Web site as to where they indicated that the show would be held. I apologize if you were offended by this error, but I would urge you to look look at it from my end—by being so strident with your response, you give me very little incentive to fix it. That said, I want to get the right address for the actual venue, and while I’m at it, I’ll add in your church so that anyone else who tries to add a venue at that address will get an error in Upcoming’s system.

Ahhh, Christian kindness and charity. [I'm including my response here as a slight reproof for myself, because I certainly could have done a better job in my response.]

Redux, 20 Jun: I got a very polite and contrite reply. I’m satisfied, especially because I’ve lashed out at people unnecessarily, and heck … my OCD nature is to want such things right as well.