I went to see Bob Dylan last week at the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow. Halfway through the encore one of the security guards came rushing down the aisle and tapped the guy in front on the shoulder and told him to put his camera away, that photography wasn’t allowed in the venue. At the same time my son was unfortunate enough to take his phone out of his pocket to check the time. The Security guard turned on him “Put that phne away now or I’ll throw you out” she shouted. it may have been “I’ll have you thrown out”, but you get the picture. I’d paid £150 for two tickets and it certainly wasn’t the way we should have been spoken to, even if Max was breaking the rules and taking a sneaky picture, which he assures me he wasn’t.
What was in quite plain sight was the fact that about a dozen our fans were standing right at the front of the stage filming the whole thing. Uninterrupted. And nobody said a word to them.
I decided I had to say something on the way out. So I did. And I was told that she hadn’t said that at all, even although everybody sitting round about us heard it. That she didn’t have the authority to say that. And that there would be no point saying it because she couldn’t enforce it.
None of which addressed my central point which was about the way she spoke rather than what she said.
I then spoke to her supervisor. she was even worse and proceeded to try to give me a lecture about how they are only acting on the instructions of the promoters and have to stop photographs being taken. Once again she missed my point. She eventually told me that it I didn’t listen to why they had to impose their rules she was walking away. Which she did.
So I spoke to the person who was in charge of all the security people for the night. She said that it was a terrible way to be spoken to and she would investigate and get back to me. She hasn’t!
It’s really not very good, is it? It’s surely not too much to expect that we’re treated as human beings by our fellow human beings. Or is that too much to ask today?
By the way. See Dylan. He was magic.
