Roger Daltrey’s Bag

Several years back I took a job in the music industry.  Since I was a teenager I wanted to work in the music industry.  The coolness of working with talented people, whom I respected, in a fast paced environment that would be changing week to week depending on who was charting was incredibly appealing.  The charge of seeing new releases and in someway affecting the daily lives of millions of people was right up my alley.  This job wasn’t that. 

With great shame, I think I lasted 9 months.  Nine slave like months.  The hours were long, the pay was short and amount to do was insurmountable.  Looking back on it with some great perspective, it probably wasn’t as bad as I’m making it seem but while you were in it, it was hellish.  Most days were no less than 10 hours without a chance to stop and eat.  The management was so disjointed that whatever was deemed as the only course of action to follow on one particular week was thrown out the next week only to be re-implemented the week after.  Financial austerity was constantly preached when it came to salaries and all expenses until on a whim the owner would blow 25k on worthless ads. 

Most of what I worked on was leading up to a singular week-long event where the wealthy would pay extraordinary amounts of money to play music and interact with musical celebrities of various degrees.  Some of these celebrities made in 45 minutes what the office staff made all year. 

When I came in for my first interview I noticed the office was covered in gear, posters, displays, and give aways from the most recent week-long event.  My eye was drawn to a pile of three identical duffle bags with the coolest design.  A little bit of background on Marshall Amplifiers, they are considered the standard when it comes to loud, rock music and they come in two pieces, the cabinet and the head.  These duffle bags where made to look like Marshall heads.  You could carry them like you would carry a head, they were similarly sized and they just looked cool. 

After I started working there a few weeks after my interview, the bags were still there.  I was told that two of them were for participants and that we needed to mail the bags to them.  The third one was for Roger Daltrey who (no pun intended) had been one of the celebrity musicians at the last event.  Now Roger Daltrey lives in England and the cost of shipping a gift bag full of freeby give aways was nearly $300, to which the owner baulked and told us to leave it there until Roger was back in New York and he would simply hand him the bag. 

Months went by without Roger Daltrey coming to New York.  Months went by with the bag sitting there taunting me with its intrinsic awesomeness.  Months went by of me working 10, 11, 12 hour days for what ended up being slightly above minimum wage when you factored out all the hours.  The owner of the company was devoutly religious.  He was Hasidic and the reason it’s important is because of Shabbos.   Prior to working there I had never heard of Shabbos.  From my understanding of it, Friday sun downish to Saturday sundownish, you can’t do anything considered work.  So every Friday the boss would leave the office early and the rest of us would continue working roughly until 5, clocking out for a rare 8 hour day. 

Well one Friday right before taking off for Shabbos the boss tasked me with an incredibly, long, time consuming, tedious task that he wanted emailed to him so he could look at it as soon as he was allowed to by God.  One by one I saw my co-workers leave the office, off to enjoy a happy hour somewhere.  Hour by hour I saw the sun set over Manhattan.  I finished the project, emailed it, closed my laptop, and said fuck it.  Fuck it, today is the day that I steal Roger Daltrey’s gift bag.  Now I oppose stealing and think it shouldn’t be done under any circumstances, but given the mocking that the bag would do to me on a daily basis and given the opportunity to be able to say that I stole Roger Daltrey’s gift bag, how was I going to live with myself if I didn’t steal the bag?  I grabbed the bag like a Marshall head, closed the lights, locked the door and smiled all the way out of the building.

Years later I was hanging out with some co-workers from that place and over drinks I let cat out of the bag and told them the story, to which they responded, “oh we knew you took it but we all stole stuff like crazy from that place, amplifiers, digital recorders, you name it. “

I still have the bag and I still get compliments on it every time I take it out in public.