Someone is taking down signs.
You know who you are.
Right now, I bet you are sitting at home with a bunch of corflutes from the Byron Comedy Festival, and a bunch of other local events, feeling powerful in your sad fight against fun.
This is taking FOMO too far. I see your cunning plan.
You don’t miss out if everyone else does too.
It’s a sickness.
An obsession with ruining the enjoyment of other people.
Sign stealer, fun destroyer, you have to stop!
Update: Various public events are continually having their public signage taken down. Not sporting or community events. So it’s clearly personal. The target is little festivals or local shows. It happens on a fairly continual basis. The most recent victim of the sign Grinch is The Byron Comedy Festival.
Just so you know, this is not my festival. It’s the creation of Mel Coppin and Zara Noruzi. They aren’t corporate tycoons. They’re two local Byron women who put on a really awesome small-scale event every year. This year it’s at the Hotel Great Northern.
I’ve been helping them since they started because what they are doing is brilliant. They work really hard to bring a five-star program to town. They need people to know about their comedy event, because if people don’t go, then things don’t happen. It’s how you kill creativity. We are moving to fun extinction. Not all of us are the right market for an under 16’s netball sign-up. We need options.
In a world going digital it’s almost charming that public signage works. It’s old school. It relies on actual humans moving through space seeing a 3D printed object and clocking that something is happening. In small communities, public signage works. So is AI doing this? Some sort of digital public space phobic bot?
Fuck! Is it Mark Zuckerberg? Greedily pushing everything into his Meta empire so we can be data-harvested like people wheat? I thought he was Mr Freedom, and against takedowns.
So who is it? Is it someone from Tidy Towns? You have a choice, a couple of public signs now and then or NOTHING on. Tidiness or creativity? We do endeavour to collect signs post-event.
So is it a compliance officer at Council? Because after Zuckerberg, when it comes to blaming people for our problems, Council are high on the list. But it’s not Council either. The Byron Comedy Festival have permission from Council to exhibit their signs. And they’ve triple checked. Even Council understands the importance of supporting our local event industry. This is really a local mystery. A challenge for true crime buffs.
Just in case you don’t realise, the event industry is in crisis. Locally we have seen Splendour cancel. It’s a tough market. We are in a cost-of-living crisis. With less and less people reading print media, or print being behind paywalls, Meta changing algorithms so you have to drop a squillion to get in front of anyone who isn’t an ‘angry men’s rights’ troll. In a small community, posters and public signage is old-school but it works.
So we need your help to stop the fun bandit. The Byron Comedy Festival has had hundreds of dollars worth of legally erected signage taken. Twice! It’s happening to other events too. If you see someone taking signage down get a photo and send it to me and I’ll publish.
We need to meet the Grinch trying to steal our fun.
In the meantime, check out the Byron Comedy Festival program on byroncomedyfest.com for the event happening at The Hotel Great Northern 30, 31 May and 1 June.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
