Bueno, No Bueno

One of my older brothers has a really cool job. He goes to concerts and uploads song lists and band pictures to the iPhone app for the company that books the venues. So he parks in the "gold" parking lot (for free), sits in the booth behind the audience (for free), and then eats the catered food that the band gets (for free) while doing minimal work. And on top of that, he gets $150 per show, and he gets reimbursed for mileage!

Now before you get too jealous, there are some drawbacks. For starters, he doesn't just get to pick his favorite bands and go to their shows. He gets assigned to shows at random. So he may get to work the sold out show of a major artist or… he may have to work a local Tejano concert where he can't understand a word of what's going on. And that happened to him last week.

My brother can say two things in Spanish: "gracias" and "por favor." Other than that, he can barely pronounce the names of foods at Mexican restaurants. So he is grossly ill-prepared for an all-Spanish concert. In fact, during the two-hour accordion-filled show, he was able to identify exactly two songs. And he was only about 50% sure those were correct. So anyone looking to find out what songs were played that night was pretty much out of luck.

And the funniest part is that he didn't have the faintest idea when the show was ending. Because he didn't know the Spanish version of "you've been great tonight" or "this is our last song." So he had to wait until the main singer waved and said "Gracias!" and the audience got up to leave. So that meant he couldn't cut out early and avoid the crowd. So imagine my brother, the only dorky-looking dude holding a laptop bag, jostling for position to the exit. He must have looked really out of place.