Gigs ain’t marriage. Get something else happening in your life. If your rubbish band wants to fire you, no harm done. Then move on with the new part of your journey unfettered.
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Quitting / Firing via Text Message Acceptable Now?
- Thread starter fu22ba55
- Start date
Everyone in Denmark. Maybe other European countries too.
Just so I’m understanding you correctly… “I’ll SMS you my email address” is what someone would say? Not, “I’ll text you my email address”?
I’m American but I didn’t say “I’ll SMS you” I referred to it by its proper name in a technical sense to avoid confusion.
Did you quit because it sucked or because you had a better option/dream? The better option bit is key. Why quit when you can move up?
When my great-grandfather had to fire a man, he would put his outstanding wages in an envelope, help him saddle his horse, and give him enough food for the day long ride into town. Anything less would be unconscionable.
It depends on how it is done. Even an in-person resignation can be a huge cluster o’ funk. It is a rare personality that can put a smiling face on bad news. So, what’s the difference? Just don’t be an idiot. Every audience is different. Be sensitive to your audience—unless you just don’t care. In that case, all bets are off.
I would phrase it a bit different because of other language constructs, something like "I'll send you an SMS with the email address". The difference from American English is that "SMS" is very precise about where the other part could expect the message, whereas "Message" could be any of a a lot of textbased communication service. Also, in Danish, "text" would have to syllables.
But mostly I think it is tradition. I think that text services we're a bit earlier in Norther Europe than in North America, and at the time we needed to distinguish it from pagers.
If there are no contracts involved or financial legalities, then it’s the better of choices. It’s showing ‘some’ 
morality, relevant to the current climes.
morality, relevant to the current climes.
I was in a band where the drummer wasn't working out. We decided that we'd have a sit down with him. It got super weird as we were talking to him he grabbed my guitar and strummed what he thought were chords. Ended up being a half ass conversation and he ended up "not fired". Not really sure what transpired but he was around for a while, faded away and then we got a new drummer. When it was MY turn to be fired, they did it via email. I'm glad they learned their lesson.
Just about everything is "acceptable" these days. For quitting, if you're just done and not giving notice, I don't see a big problem. If you're quitting after "X gig, then yeah at rehearsal is better. What does it do for anyone to make the effort of going to a rehearsal just to say "bye"? Phone is better, but today, texting is just the way we tend to communicate.
It kind of depends on the group dynamics - if text is a primary source of communication, then no biggie.
For firing someone, it's a bit different and I'd say at least a phone call is called for if not a face to face. But I have been notified of not making the cut after plenty of auditions via text and the delivery method never bothered me.
It kind of depends on the group dynamics - if text is a primary source of communication, then no biggie.
For firing someone, it's a bit different and I'd say at least a phone call is called for if not a face to face. But I have been notified of not making the cut after plenty of auditions via text and the delivery method never bothered me.
I agree, but that contradicts your "But you never quit anything." comment which is what I was referring to.
SMS arrived with the GSM standard in the 90's. SMS is limited to 160 characters. Back in the day, you would pay maybe 10 cents per SMS sent and some plans charged for receiving SMS messages. That could be expensive especially when you gave your kid a cell phone and they went to town. The industry secret was that SMS were sent via the dead space between packets and really cost nothing to send. The other secret was that your messages were sent in the clear, no encryption.
I use SMS email gateways with Verizon to send myself text messages from email for certain network / server error messages at work. Ten cents / SMS seems outrageous today, but it was cheap compared to most of the alphanumeric pager rates around that time. A guy at work had an alpha pager in his desk that he didn't even carry to receive alerts. Well, the script that generated the alerts wasn't as robust as it should have been and he ended up with a $10k "paging" bill that month. That was during the internet boom days and nobody blinked at that hefty bill.
The term "text" is used more frequently, but "SMS" is still in use, at least regionally and generationally. But when I say "text", I'm really sending an encrypted message via Apple's Message app.
A good life hack is to learn how to send an Apple Message via SMS. We had a rare earthquake in the Virginia / Maryland area years ago. The cellular networks were completely jammed and I couldn't even get an Apple Message through. But SMS messages went through with zero delay even on a jammed network. It's just an option in settings.
I use SMS email gateways with Verizon to send myself text messages from email for certain network / server error messages at work. Ten cents / SMS seems outrageous today, but it was cheap compared to most of the alphanumeric pager rates around that time. A guy at work had an alpha pager in his desk that he didn't even carry to receive alerts. Well, the script that generated the alerts wasn't as robust as it should have been and he ended up with a $10k "paging" bill that month. That was during the internet boom days and nobody blinked at that hefty bill.
The term "text" is used more frequently, but "SMS" is still in use, at least regionally and generationally. But when I say "text", I'm really sending an encrypted message via Apple's Message app.
A good life hack is to learn how to send an Apple Message via SMS. We had a rare earthquake in the Virginia / Maryland area years ago. The cellular networks were completely jammed and I couldn't even get an Apple Message through. But SMS messages went through with zero delay even on a jammed network. It's just an option in settings.
I’ve never quit a band. I’ve left a few, but never because of the band. At worst I got too busy on another project and bowed out for a bit...and was pleased to be away from them!
