I hate the Blues Station in Columbus, Ohio
I write you to express my sheer annoyance with the Blues Station in Columbus, which is located somewhere along Vine Street. (I don’t intend to give free advertising here, so I refuse to tell you where it is or what the link to their web site is.)
The club itself was passable, although they had typical corporate kitsch Applebee’s-style junk up on the wall: various pictures of dead people, taxidermied chickens, and two pristine-clean generic “route 66″ signs. Also, there was a creepy, extremely lengthy graffito about the difference between sex with men and women at the top of the inside of the men’s room door. About the graffito: it spanned the width of the door for about six lines. Either the management put it there on purpose to impress us (lame), or the club is so dead that nobody comes and nobody ever uses the bathroom so vandals have just hours to scrawl away. Either way, this is a club that tolerates an obnoxious stereotype demeaning to both men and women, because nobody painted it over.
I went there Wednesday to see good friend Matt Meyer singing in his awesome band, Back to Mono. It was a great time. Matt Meyer: husband, father-to-be, programmer par excellence, and musician. Plus, Arnie says the drummer is cute even though he’s getting married.
Unfortunately, the mean people at the Blues Station in the Arena District have a real problem with courtesy. The night of the show, I went to their web site to try to figure out how to find the place. The Blues Station web site was designed by hacks who were apparently inspired by the same junk on the walls, so it is a real mish-mash of colors, fonts, and information, with no coherent organizing principle.
All I wanted to do was find the street address of the Blues Station or perhaps driving directions to Columbus’ Blues Station. And I finally did: it was sort of in the right-hand center, floating on its own, and it was in seven-point type. Impossible to find. So, I’m a nice guy, I figure I’ll send them an e-mail about that, telling they maybe they should have a whole page for directions and a map, or at least increase the font from squinty to merely fine print.
Thus starting an e-mail correspondence they were (apparently) to regret. Oh sure, the Blues Station was nice at first: I got the following e-mail right back.
Thank you for the feedback!
We’ll check into correcting that!BLUES STATION
But — tragically — the next e-mail I got was some obnoxious 15KB spam junk admail from BLUES STATION! (in Columbus, Ohio) I couldn’t believe it! Nowhere on their little web form did it say I was going to be signing up for spam! So I wrote them back.
Hey Blues Station,
I gave you some feedback about your web site and then the very same day you spammed me with your newsletter?! Nowhere on your form did it say I was going to get junk mail if I gave you some useful comments. Please take me off your list.
Bill Cash
Just a few hours later came the reply.
The people that do receive our newsletter do not consider it “spam” but valuable information about promoting a dying art form (blues). You can un-subscribe by pressing an UNSUBSCRIBE button at the very bottom of the email newsletter.
Thanks,BLUES STATION
That was the last straw for me. I wrote BLUES STATION back including the following:
Come on, man, it is just common courtesy that you don’t add people to your junk mail list without permission. I refuse to go to your newsletter and click any links. Do the right thing and stop putting me — and everyone else — on your list. Talk about creating ill will.
Bill Cash
Fortunately, the good but socially inept laggards at the Blues Station finally saw the light and sent the following curt and very un-chill missive.
You have been taken off the database. Do not contact us again.
Yeah, we’ll see how that goes, BLUES STATION.
People like this simply should not be allowed on the Internet. Don’t let a bunch of corporate bar owner spammers push you around. If you get junk mail from a place charging a three-dollar cover charge even when acoustic musicians are on stage, fight back! You’ll eventually be glad you did.