Crazy from the heat

We've had a week of record and near record temperatures in the Northwest. I've managed to add to to the sweltering conditions by having my own personal meltdowns. People are definitely struggling right now. I've been getting lots a request for "help". I try to some compassion but after a while things start to become too much. When you start to cringe everytime the text message chime goes off becuse its going to be another "You're the last person I want to ask but...". Things came to a complete overload when I had a former dancer fall on hard times and end up moving in with me.

I felt like I was getting everybody's problems dumped in my lap. I'm usually a pretty calm and deliberate person, but a broke this time. I went and whacked my MySpace account, twitter account, and deleted a bunch of numbers from phone. I was trying to purge section of my life. Probably not the most healthy approach, but I've got enough of my own stress going on.

I'm transfering all my blogs from my myspace page over to Blogger, grammar errors and all. The dates will be screwed up, but that's not a big deal. I don't write much about current events. I'll try to maintain the same order though.

On a lighter note some local hackers powned a traffic sign with an appropiate message. Its nice the county is warning folks that there are zombie strippers on the loose.

No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy

The title is a very rough translation of an epitaph of an early dictator from the Roman Empire (Sulla). It seems to be an accurate description of the way dancers treat each other. I get to hear arguments from both sides. Dancers either seem to be the best of friends or mortal enemies. The sales environment dancers have to work in helps create the. I’ve never gotten use to the competitive nature of sales I work in. Where I work there is a limited resource for support sales. We only have so many parts and demonstration units to go around. For the most part everybody tries to cooperate, but if situation arises the sales folks have no problem stabbing each other in the back. The mantra is “its better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission”. Sorry man, I had to a chance to make a commission and had the demo.

The dancer’s environment is even worse than what I work in. While the sales folks have to compete over demo resources, their territories and pay structure is very tightly defined. Dancer’s however, have to compete with each other for pretty much everything. This ranges from seats in the dressing room to customers on the floor to the outfits they where. Who they follow on rotation, who goes on stage next to them also can affect the night’s income. Dancers have the ability to affect each other income on many levels. When it comes to money things get very emotional very quickly. There are so many ways for dancers to conflict with each other.

On the flip side, I don’t think anybody but another dancer can really appreciate what a dancer goes through. This is true of a lot of jobs. When I listen to people talk about their jobs, it doesn’t always sink in the level of which their job touches all aspects of life. I’m probably more informed than most folks about the job of a dancer, but I can’t say I truly understand. I think this is even more true when people think the job is morally wrong. Dancer won’t judge another girl purely because she’s dancer. I think this creates a higher level of camaraderie than most jobs.

Because of the higher level of camaraderie I think dancers feel I much more intense level of betrayal when something goes wrong. Hell hath no fury like a women’s scorn, and things go to 11 when it’s a pissed off dancer. In an odd sort of way, its similar to dating somebody you work with (in some cases with dancers they are dating). An intense personal conflict at work is a miserable thing. You have to go to work. You have to pay the bills. You can’t avoid the conflict.

When you add alcohol and pressure of sales conflict almost becomes inevitable. I’ve seen blow ups occur from simple miscommunication. Two dancers had just done a VIP for a big spender. He had tipped them very well. They were sitting at my table when they talking about the amount of the tip. Each girl was talking about a different number, yet neither girl realized it. They were both really happy about getting a tip above and beyond the normal VIP fee. It was an awkward moment for me, I decided that it would better for me to point this out and risk the getting caught in the middle of fight than play dumb. One (or both) of the girls had to be wrong, maybe if they talked about while it was still fresh in their minds nothing would happen. I told them what I heard, and then watched as they looked at each other; one said $200, the other said $300. Both nodded their heads in agreement and changed the subject. I’m not sure what each other heard. Later on when it came to split up the money things went bad. Really Bad. Neither one ever came back to me to ask what I heard. Perhaps they didn’t want to involve me or maybe they didn’t hear me either.

Sometimes I’ve seen dancer form into cliques that support each other work. An example of this is the Dolphin 5. They formed a consortium of sorts. They always worked together and to some degree managed to take control of the club. A few girls got run out of the Dolphin after getting crossed up with one of the girls. Usually the just protected their own interests, but occasionally we’re bullies that chased off girls they didn’t like. They managed to not turn on each other. That was back when money was really good though, I’m not sure how well they’d hold up now with money so tight.

Bloggers, Bloggers, everywhere and not a thought to think

The title to this blog post is misleading and just a little pretentious. I actually spend a lot of time reading other peoples blogs, I've learned a lot about the industry from them. I’ve always wondered what exactly do dancers really think of their customers. Knowing how things work is an absolute compulsion of mine. I’m forever taking things apart to see what makes them tick. By going into engineering I’ve managed to turn a personality defect into a career. Dancer blogs provide a relatively uvarnished look at customers.

I first ran into dancer blogs by accident. I was trying to find the name of club I went to when I lived in Austin Texas. Just googling when I ran across a burlesque show, one of the performers had a web site named “rivercitykitty”. Rivercitykitty is a blog by Susan Wayward about her experiences dancing. From there I realized she worked at D2 from time to time. From her site I was able to find a bunch of different dancer blogs. I’ll always have a fondness for Susan’s blog (and Susan, even if she currently on blogging hiatus), since she the first person to link to mine.
The first thing that stuck me about most dancer blogs is that it provides a forum to bitch about customers that isn’t directly confrontational. One of the reasons I started this blog was to vent my frustrations about the club I hang out at. Dancer blogs tend to be more of an on line diary. This gives them a very personal feel. In an industry that hides much of the humanity in stage names and glam make up, it makes for a striking contrast.

I can completely sympathize with having to deal with a customer that you find completely and utterly revolting. Sitting smiling listening to them talk, all the while I’m thinking about how much I’d like to bash their skull in with a brick. Fortunately for me, most people in my work world have to maintain a level of professional decorum at work, so I’m not subjected to the more primitive aspects of the human condition. I have to deal with egos, giant towering repulsive underserved egos. Unfortunately for me I can’t decide to tell a customer to fuck off when it gets to bad. I have to sit for hours at a never ending business dinner meeting listening to a guy who is either a pathological liar or completely delusional. I’ve had to sit and politely listen to some guy tell me he invented the iPod. Yeah, sure. I get to hear stories about how they used to be Vice President of Nothing in Particular at Microsoft. Ugh.

It’s startling to read about some of the customers that go into clubs. There are some really scary folks with dollar bills. It’s also a little rattling to see some aspects of myself in their behavior. It's pretty eye opening.

It’s also stunning to see some things pulled off by the management at clubs. A of clubs take advantage of the fact most dancers won’t pursue legal action against a club for fear of losing their job. Dancers are customers of the club, they pay to work their. Yet they get treated with contempt by management. This is part of the club world that rarely gets any visibility. I’m not sure how prevalent it is industry. I have no idea how honest most clubs are. I suspect with the bad economy it’s probably getting worse. Dollars at the clubs are getting more scarce, as girls lose their day jobs the number of dancers that are available is rising.

Another of my favorite blogs is ChristianMarie, The laziest Stripper. I hope she doesn’t mind me mentioning her blog. It was the first blog that was linked to mine that I didn’t know anything about. When I saw “The other side of the rail” in the blogs list I thought somebody else had already picked that name for their blog. I clicked on the link to what low life scum had taken the name. I was floored when I realized that I was the low life scum. Wow, I’m famous. Not really. I sure her blogs hits spiked of the charts on the day I discovered her blog. I kept clicking on it like it kid with a new toy. Besides being linked to mine, its a really entertaining blog to read

Don't forget to bring your singles to the interview

If you want to see the true character of a person take him to a strip club and get him drunk. One company I worked at the sales group used this as a method to screen people that were being considered. The company had a very proactive method of hiring. Rather than post a want ads and wait, the HR department would maintain a list of folks they would go after and offer jobs to. This would cause problems from time to time, they were raiding their customers and vendors for talent, but the quality of employees they had were pretty high.

Most of the people never knew they were being screened. Either we’d take them out at a trade show or during a business trip. The first thing you’d discovered about them is if they’d even go into the club. The sales group had a relatively wild social life. I’ve never worked at a place where there was so much corporate sponsored debauchery. The desire to go out and party on the corporate dime is hardly an indicator as to good somebody is at their job. The recruit’s job skill usually wasn’t the issue at the time, we already new how got they were from past work experiences.

What we didn’t know is if they played well and got along with others. If they were willing to go hang out at a strip club they odds are they would be comfortable with the job atmosphere at our company. On Monday morning when people returned to work nursing the aftermath what ever excess they indulge in over the weekend, it’s better if to have everybody at least sympathetic. Some people become very uncomfortable around hearing about ‘partying’ or worse yet will become show open contempt for the revelers. Having workers openly judging other workers will rapidly destroy morale. At least if they will walk into a strip club they aren’t openly judgmental.

Seeing how they react to the strip club environment is also telling. A strip club pretty much stomps on the expected “morals’ of polite society. At least for me, it’s hard to not covet thy neighbor’s wife when she is dancing naked in front of me. The normal boundaries of social behavior are not required. Its OK to stare at her boobs, its OK to stare at her boobs while drinking, its OK to stare are boobs while drinking and drooling on yourself. More importantly it’s OK to talk about her boobs. Once the normal behavior boundaries are crossed it’s easier to talk about things that are also outside the lines. You can go into swapping bar stories of assorted strip club adventures. I’ve got a million of those, maybe I should write a blog? (Oops, too late).

You can get the recruit to talk about his experiences. You can learn a lot from those, especially how accountable they are. After they got hammered, fell over and smashed a bunch of the furniture, did they apologize and try to make amends. Or did they start bitching about how stupid to put a table in the middle of the floor and surround it with chairs. What an absolute death trap (True story).

Alcohol is also factor. It lowers inhibitions so people will talk more freely. After a couple drinks no subject is too taboo. What you can’t ask on a job interview is pretty amazing. You can’t ask how old they are (but you can ask when they graduated from High school) you can’t ask if they are married, you can’t ask if they have kids, you can’t ask what religion they are. These laws vary from state to stare and regularly get ignored. I’d really like to see some plaintiff explain to a judge that he was illegally asked about his marriage status while getting a lap dance. I’ve been asked all the questions and happily answered them, lap dance not required. I’m usually more interested in trying to get the job. All these rules go right out the window at a strip club. Catering to the guy by buying him drinks and dances also will begin to tell. We would make him the center of attention and cater to his whims. Is he grateful or dies he turn into a pompous ass? If the recruit drinks himself under the table in first thirty minutes, he has other problems.

Watching how they treat other people after a couple drinks is very telling. If the guy begins to put down all the crack ‘ho bitches working at the club, going off on a misogynist tirade about the evil’s of the women and their wicked ways you probably don’t want on your pay roll. He probably has some issues to sort out. You can also watch how he deals with the dancers. Does this guy have the basic humanity to treat people decently? Dancers will put up with a lot of bullshit if they get paid.

By removing the social norms, liberally adding alcohol you can get to somebody’s true nature at strip club. Curiously they never took me to a strip club when they recruited me (bastards). I suppose they didn’t have to. All they had to do was to go down to the club and check my references. I’m not sure what kind of impression I would have made when we walked into the club and they found out I was on a first name basis with half the dancers.

The other industry icon

Probably the number one icon of the stripper industry is the platform stiletto heel. The number two icon of the industry is probably the iPhone. Compared to the engineers, salesman accounts other folks I work with. A far higher percentage of dancers own iPhone then all those other groups. The company I work for sells components to Apple. In a very small way I get money from dancers every time they buy one. The money flow is still pretty one sided I spend a lot more on dancers than I get, but keep buying those iPhones and iPods anyway.

There are many features that make this a really desirable gadget for dancers. The obvious is that is an excellent music and video player. Music is an integral part of a dancer’s job, having an excellent music player makes some sense. I’m not sure how much some of the DJ’s or clubs have embraced the digital music. Is most of the music now played of a laptop or CD? With the advent of MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking systems the iPhone’s is a great device to maintain contact with their customers and promoting themselves.

A surprising number of dancers buy iPhones to entertain their kids. Perhaps that’s not the primary reason, but it’s definitely a factor. That’s their story at least. I suspect they may just want to be able to watch movies and play games while it’s slow. Nah, it’s probably just for the kids. (ahem)

There are a lot of feature that the iPhone has that aren’t utilized by dancers. One is the count down timers. If you hit the clock icon on the iPhone, one of the features that appear at the bottom is the time. This is a minute timer. I often hear about dancers getting forgotten back in the VIP area. The bouncers will forget or be distracted by something and not get a dancer when the time is up. The count down timer provides a large easy to see display showing remaining time. It even has an alarm that goes off at the end. It’s better to have the bouncer show up incase the customer gets cranky, but it does create a break point to stop the VIP dance. Perhaps a VIP app should be written with preset times built in. It could have a special feature to “accelerate” the time to get rid of obnoxious customers. Have two start buttons that look the same. The top button has a normal time, the bottom button has a faster timer. Jerk customer you want to get rid of faster? We got an app for that.

The more industrious dancers could buy a spread sheet application and log her income and expenses in her phone at the end of the night. I suppose that might be another possible app. A program that logged all the stage fees, income, tip outs and other income/expenses then put them into a form that could be easily imported into a TurboTax or Tax cut.

Actually most smart phones have these features. The G1 and Palm Pre have the same features. One feature the new iPhone 3Gs has is the where am I app. If you lose your iPhone you can log into a web sire and query the location of the phone using the built in GPS. Not that dancers ever lose anything after drinking a little too much.

Outside in

I guess I could consider myself an “insider” at the club I hang out. Many times I know more about what’s going on at the staff than the dancers, its fairly common when something major happens I’ll a get calls and texts from dancers wondering what’s going on. Most dancers will trust me with their purses (much to my dismay). This is stark contrast to when I first started hanging out at the club and was a complete stranger to everybody. I know I get treated different because I’m more sympathetic to dancer issues than most customer, provided they don’t do anything stupid like make me wait, watch their purse, or call me a creepy club regular. I’m also short and fat, but please don’t call me that while you are trying to sell me something.

The first thing that stuck me when I first started hanging out was that all the girls had stage names. From a purely practical point of view, stage names make perfect sense. It both provides a degree of security from crazy stalker guys, and also helps create the stage presence. But the first time a dancer sits down with you and say “Hi, I’m Epiphany” your immediately gut reaction is no its not. Nobody is named Epiphany and if it was you would shorten it to “Pif” or “Fanny” or “Lisa”. It’s an odd contradiction. Here is a girl who is (however falsely) is acting as if she likes me and wants to get to know me better, yet won’t tell me her real name. She’s trying to establish a bond of trust yet won’t reveal something that seems fundamental like a first name.

Eventually I got past that. I began to judge how good I thought their name was. Most of the time you can pick out the girls who selected their name for a particular reason and the other girls who looked at a list and pick the name that sucked the least. Even with that it’s still an odd conversation. Dancer will talk about normal everyday things then suddenly veer away from a subject like its matter of national security. “I had to go in and the get the alignment fixed on my Hon…. Er, um, car”. I have to admit that i'd never consider revealing what kind of car you drive could be a dangerous. Getting followed home by psycho customer is always a major risk. Not only does that put the dancer at risk, it also endangers their family. I don’t care what you do for a living; nobody should have to worry about the security or stability of their family life for a job.

It becomes a potentially problematic when a dancer becomes comfortable enough that they let things slip with out meaning to. The first time a dancer accidentally told me her real name. I suddenly turned and looked at her with a big “Ah Hah!” expression. She immediately became massively defensive. It was weird. I have always been very respectful and polite to her. Yet that reaction set off all her danger instincts. Eventually I developed the rule of three when it came to things like this. Until a dancer mentions something personal three times before I’ll acknowledge it. Until then I’ll simply act like I didn’t notice the fact she just told me where she lives, or hands me her driver’s license (provided she has one) while looking for her lip gloss. As long as I act like its not important most dancers will not feel threatened.

I went along at this level for quite some time. I was “club friends” with the dancers. They were completely relaxed with me at the club, yet I couldn’t tell you the most basic thing about them outside the club. This changed when I became a regular for one of the more elite dancer/queen bee girls. It may sound odd but I used to be intimidated by the really hot girls that everybody went to the rack to see. I assumed that they always had some sort of big roller who was going to pay them tons of money just to sit with them. I always talked to the girls who would approach me. I don’t think a lot of dancers realize that a dancer who will walk up and talk to a lone customer will become much more attractive than the six foot bleach blonde pipe cleaner with massive boobs.

The elite girl actually approached me one slow night. We hit it off and began a friendship that we still maintain (to lesser degree) to this day. The first thing that changed is that she started treating me like another dancer when it came to conversations. It would be funny to watch the reaction of other dancers when the elite girl would start talking about a subject that would normally be considered taboo. I suppose this is the point I became “Harmless Todd”. But once that barrier had been broached, I could be trusted with personal information conversations changed permanently. The elite girls endorsement gave me credibility as club insider and not a crazy customer.

I also discovered the ability to keep my mouth shut about things and not pass along gossip (no matter how desperately I wanted to) actually turned me into a counselor for some girls. I think I provided a safe ear to bend. I wasn’t part of the dressing room drama crowd, but knew enough about the job enough to be an understanding ear. Unfortunately I also get drawn into some dancer conflicts. On rare occasion I’ve even be a go between to get things sorted out. I like being an insider ultimately, I’ve made some very good friends at the club because of it.

Drunk XX chromosomes

So which is worse, a drunk and obnoxious male or female customer? They are both probably really difficult to deal with. From purely anecdotal evidence it seems that really drunk women are much more irritating to deal with. A lot of women seem to think the normal rules of touching don’t apply to them. To be fair men are the same way, but however obnoxious it’s sort of expected behavior from men.

A couple months ago I observed a hammered female customer. It struck me that she was obnoxious as any guy, but it was worse because she was allowed to get away with things that would have gotten a guy kicked out immediately. I first noticed her when she bounced off me while I was standing at the bar. When I turned to look at who had bumped in to me I saw her stagger away. She crashed through the tables ricocheting off customers and solid objects like a pin ball, leaving a trail of knocked over chairs. It was pretty obvious to the casual observer she was tanked.

She was sitting with a mixed group of men and women. They were gathered around a table next to the stage. They were sort of tipping, there were seven people in the group but they’d only put up a dollar or two for each set. They were spending a lot more money on drinks than dancers. Interspersed with the tips were the occasional “Woo Hoo”s screams. Normally these don’t bother me, but when it occurs for no particular reason its get annoying. Getting into the performance is pretty cool, screaming when the dancer checks to make sure her shoe is on OK is just stupid.

Eventually they all got up as a group and sat down at the rack. This pleased the dancers who finally thought they might actually make some money off this group. The first dancer got up and started her set. As she moved around the stage and approached the knot of drunken customers, the girl suddenly reached out to grab the dancer. With Kung Fu Panda like skills the dancer knocked her hand away and began back peddling away. The dancer went around to all the other customers then approached the group again. Sure enough drunk girl’s hand shot out trying to grab the dancer. This time the dancer grabbed her hand and asked drunk girl to stop. The song ended. The dancer collected her tips, taking time to stop and talk to the drunk girl again. I assumed she was trying to make sure that her point was clear. I think she would have needed to bash drunk girls head with a brick to make it sink in.

It was for not. The second set began and as soon as the dancer approached the drunk girl again her hand was out trying to grab the dancer. For the remainder of the set the dancer avoided that section of the rack, always keeping at least three feet away. The set ended and as she got off stage she warned the next dancer. Except to collect tips the next dancer barely approached the drunk girl. If a guys was continually trying to grab a dancer on stage he’d been escorted out instantly. Yet this girl continued trying to grope anything dancer who strayed to close. Eventually drunk girl gave up grabbing a dancer and decided that she would get up and dance along the performer. It was moderately amusing watching drunk girl flounder around like a demented walrus for a little bit. Then it became a nuisance. Eventually her companions decided that she had enough and escorted her out.

During the entire time the bar staff neither intervened or cut her off. I supposed it’s a little different with this girl. From a purely practical point of view most dancers I know could have punched her lights out if she really did go too far. Still most people don’t want to half to resort to fighting just to do their job. If you are looking for a fair and just environment a strip club isn’t the place to go.