BOSTON — Door staff trainee, Shawn “Fitzy” Fitzgerald, failed the Whiskey Fist music venue’s onboarding test of sticking patrons’ arm hair in an adhesive wristband, making him ineligible for employment according to management.
“I practiced wicked hard for this test,” said Fitzgerald. “I rehearsed it on my roommate Vinnie, who’s Italian, so he’s got an arm like a friggin’ orangutan. We didn’t have any unused wristbands so I had to MacGyver it with some Scotch tape and a Miller High Life label. I must have done it like twenty times, to the point where you could actually see the skin on Vinnie’s wrist. Then at the club, they give me some wimpy kid who looks like he barely hit puberty. All my dreams of opening the back door with some dude’s head are all flushed down the shitter now. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Security manager and aspiring MMA fighter, Todd Creery, proctors the test at the legendary Lansdowne Street Venue and believes it’s not as easy as many people think it is.
“A lot of people think any Neanderthal can do this job, but the truth is it takes a certain skill to get it right,” said Creery while emptying the contents of a patron’s bag on the floor and sifting through it with his foot. “Just because you’re ripped, or your father didn’t give you enough love as a child, doesn’t mean you know how to deal with the public. There’s so much more to the gig than just 86ing people. You gotta know when to yell at them for standing in random spots in the club. You gotta know which crowd surfers to let fall over the barricade. Most importantly, you gotta make sure you start pushing them out the door as soon as the band plays the last note. If you can’t make someone’s wristband so annoying that they want to chop their arm off then this job might not be for you.”
Janice Wallace is the head of Distribution for Tyvek’s wristband division, which supplies nearly 85% of the nation’s music venues.
“We originally designed these in partnership with a study at Stanford to tag how much alcohol was being consumed by college students during finals,” said Wallace. “We made them out of the same material we use to keep water and high-speed winds out of houses during construction. And the adhesive sticks to hair so well that it is now the leading chemical compound used in hair removal. It was proven to be 75 times stickier than the wax they had previously used. We are so happy our wristbands are now commonplace in every music venue and universally reviled by anyone forced to wear one.”
At press time, Fitzgerald was seen practicing for another position at an all-ages venue which requires door staff to use an obscene amount of permanent marker drawing Xs on patrons’ hands.