Doing the Right Thing

        Well wouldn't you know it, if we didn't have enough on our plates already, a company called The Room Store has filed for bankruptcy and on their only 800 number left in the world they have mistakenly -- (or not) -- given out OUR record company's 800 number as their "claims department". It started about a week ago. We started receiving an inordinately high volume of calls compared to normal, and more odd was the fact that they all seemed to be coming in from "middle American" towns and States like North Carolina or Texas, places we never receive calls from. Being in the entertainment industry, I'd say a good 99% of the calls we receive come in from either New York or LA. [Hold on. I've got to take another call from one of them....] One can tell from the area code if it's a real business call or not. A lot of times if it isn't a NY or CA area code it's a wrong number; or it's some poor young artist who thinks they can just call up a record label and get a record contract. (I remember being like that once... So I don't blame them. But it just doesn't work that way. Damned if you can get an undiscovered young artist to realize that though...)
        Talk about annoying. At first I and the rest of us here at DVG just kept "ignoring" all the calls and sending them right through to voicemail. After a few days, we were going so out of our minds with it that we started answering the calls and telling the people that we were the Room Store and that we were going to award them a $500 gift certificate for their troubles. [Hold on. I'm taking another call now...] We only did it a few times and were just having a little fun. Hey, remember now, we're in the business of rock and roll and compared to most of the things we do, this is pretty mild. But we hadn't yet discovered what was really going on. After speaking to one too many of the Room Store's frustrated customer's we discovered that the company has in fact gone out of business and filed bankruptcy.