Frustrations about civilty

It was a very long day today. We had a show this morning at 10:15, which went very well. We only had a crowd of 40 or so, but they had read the show, so they were a very good crowd. The problems started after the show, because we had blown a tire on our trip to the school this morning. This makes the second flat tire, coming after the one we had on Day #1 in Charlottle. So we had to spend almost two hours at a local Walmart while they changed our tires and gave us a new spare. One of the girls in our company had left her bank card in the previous town, so we needed to then find a Bank of America in Oklahoma City. This shouldn't have been too hard, but the GPS device we had led us astray, until it finally took the fourth (fourth!) try to find an actual branch of the bank. That took us until about 4:30, and then it was a three and a half hour drive to Dallas, Texas, where we have a show in the morning.

This was a very long day, and tensions were starting to run high. I was seated very firmly in the second bench in the van, headphones in my ears, ipod playing away, determined to either sleep, ignore, or detach myself from everything that was happening around me. As the stage manager, I have a lot of responsibility from 7am until 1pm, and then after that I want to just sit there and disengage. Some of our company are very "touchy," and it's making me cranky. We had a big discussion about saying "please" and "thank you" before we left, but I'll confess that I can't think of any stage managers who routinely throw those words into things like "Quiet in the house" or "10 minutes!" I've done this kind of thing before, I've stage managed before, and I know the tone of professionalism. So it irritates me when people want to treat this as anything other than what it is - a job. And a job that I know how to do well.