Jongleurs Week – Day 2

As soon as I started at Jongleurs, it was clear that it was chaos.

Our job was to book tickets over the phone. These were largely for people who’d purchased Groupons at 2 tickets for £8 and had to call back to confirm the reservation. The website was very slow to use and always on the brink of crashing, so halfway through booking someone in you’d often be stuck apologising and waiting for the website to come back to life.

There was a backlog of hundreds and hundreds of emails and dozens of voicemails from missed calls. From disgruntled customers who’d been to crap shows or received terrible customer service, people who’d been stuck calling time and again without response, etc.

The office could be divided into two. There were four of us who came from a comedy background – 3 of us were stand ups and one had previously worked at Backyard Comedy Club and was now an assistant to Donna. All four of us knew roughly what was going on with the business and were able to work as hard as we could.

The others were useless, they were all designated individual tasks that took very little time doing, but that they would procrastinate over all day. One of them was supposed to be in charge of IT, but would spend weeks over a mailing list. One of them was supposed to sort customer emails, but would spend hours doing a reply then lose track over all the customers she’d promised to get back to that day. One worked on the phones, and had a haughty tone where he’d always wind up customers and get complaints. Two were teenagers who were family friends with Anas, who were completely gormless. One of these guys was put in charge of Christmas bookings, but would lie back with his feet on the desk all day half asleep. He tried to convince me on day 1 that he was booking a massive event that Alan Sugar was coming to and he needed a comedian. I had my head in the clouds so much I tried to convince him to book a better comedian than me, not realising that he was just insecure and lying. He used to explain to us how we couldn’t step foot into Brixton, which was strange as he was about 5’7 and Asian. He did have a bit of thinking he was on the Apprentice, slick backed hair, tight fitting trousers.

A new manager came in around the time I started who’d been a successful manager for Highlight, which was the breakaway 5 clubs that were actually successful (Camden, Watford, Leeds and a couple of others) that had broken away from Jongleurs before Jongleurs had brought them back and helped them to get rid of their audience. This manager was always in the office next to us or at meetings, and had no sense of what was going on under her nose. I was going stir crazy. These stressful conditions bring out my bipolar symptoms. On some days I started to be convinced I could save the place. I started trying to write a report about how they could save money by paying middle spots £50 each and break away from the model where they were paying 4 acts £250-£300 in order to compete with The Comedy Store, blood money as these acts were playing to often between 20-70 people, less than 10 of whom had paid full price for a ticket.