Irratating

So I sign up for this online voice-over service. I had been associated with the service for a couple of years, but as the end of 2009 approached and I needed stuff to write off, I figured I'd sign up as a premium member and take advantage of the service in a more meaningful way. I mean, I have a relatively decent recording set-up at home and, what the hell, if this service could nail me a few tiny-paying jobs here and there, what's the harm? As soon as I paid the premium fee, I was sent a number of audition opportunities and I made the audition recordings at home and sent them out and hoped for the best. Just like everything else I do as a writer/performer, I was working ON SPEC. I'm used to it. Rejection is the Tonto to my Lone Ranger. Not all that helpful, but always there.

I've auditioned for maybe five V.O. gigs, with no results yet. Fine. No problem. As I say, it's easy to make a recording and send it out online. No skin off my nose.

Today, though, I discovered that one of the "premium" services I receive is that Voice Seekers are allowed and even encouraged to "tag" my demo reel. This means that a Voice Seeker can listen to my online reel, which is a professionally-made 2 minutes of me reading copy, and then "tag" my reel. Tagging simply means the Voice Seeker can apply a word of reaction to my reel, and that word is listed as a tag. The first three words I received as tags were "exciting," "professional" and "sense of humor," which is technically three words, but who's quibbling. I don't know where these tags originated, and for all I know, they just came from the service trying to make me feel good.

But about fifteen minutes ago, I received an email from the service titled, "Congratulations! You have been tagged!" This meant that another Voice Seeker had listened to my reel, and applied a tag to it. I checked it out.

There, in addition to "professional," "exciting" and "sense of humor," was the tag "irratating."

Think about it. There's somebody out there, who is seeking voice over talent, who, therefore, is a person in a position to hire people, to be the BOSS of another person, who CAN'T FRIGGIN' SPELL!

Listen, if you're gonna dump on me, at least, for the love of God, use spell check. Some words are not caught by spell check, but IRRATATING certainly would be.

Now, this incident kind of spills over into the rest of my work life.

There are, out there, people in CHARGE OF US, who DO NOT KNOW WDF THEY ARE DOING!

And yet, they are in charge of us.

They write things about us.

They write anything they want to write about us.

Because THEY ARE IN CHARGE.

How did this happen, is my question?

Did this asshole who thinks my voice is "irratating" get out of "middel" school?

Full disclosure: the voice over service makes it very easy for "talent," which they tell me is what I am, to go into the files and remove tags we don't "agree with." Well, it's not that I didn't agree with the comment. I don't, but that wasn't my main reason for deleting the word.

I just couldn't stand the thought that somebody out there with the brain of a Ticonderoga Number 2 pencil eraser had the power to critique my work. I don't know who he or she is. He or she will never read this (or have it read to him or her). So all I can do is holler in the wilderness of cyberspace.

PEOPLE IN CHARGE OF ME! LEARN HOW TO SPELL!!!