A concert on Monday night at New York’s Radio City Music Hall was a special occasion for Frank Miller: his parents’ wedding anniversary. He didn’t end up seeing the show — and before he could even get past security, he was informed that he was in fact banned for life from the venue and all other properties owned by Madison Square Garden (MSG).
After scanning his ticket and promptly being pulled aside by security, Miller was told by staff that he was barred from the MSG properties for an incident at the Garden in 2021. But Miller says he hasn’t been to the venue in nearly a decade.
“They hand me a piece of paper letting me know that I’ve been added to a ban list,” Miller says. “There’s a trespass notice if I ever show up on any MSG property ever again,” which includes venues like Radio City, the Beacon Theatre, the Sphere, and the Chicago Theatre.
In my pass job I was a business intelligence analysist in an insurance company, and my boss came to me and told me to take my computer and go to some conference room. There was one of the managers of legal affairs and she ask me to do look up something on the database, pretty regular job that is usually a ticket but ok, so I did her queries when suddenly they went a direction they don’t normally go and asked me to join the table with the employees database and do a pivot table for employee and count of lines and there was this lady with like 95% of the count, the manager asked me to send her that table and told me that she already knew it was her, but needed the evidence to HR. One week later the lady was fired and I still feel uncomfortable about that. Later I read some essay about abstraction, and how upper you go on the corporate chain, people gradually stop being humans to be just numbers, but for me, that day, my work had a name and a direct consequence that I can’t abstract from.