@SteveSoCal wrote:
Interesting points. When I was a scheduler, I noted that people from the arts often were the best performers as new mystery shoppers. I always attributed that to them being accustomed to working hard for very little pay.
This may be related, but it's likely also the fact that we have to literally be perfect in order to have a good performance. So most of us are extremely conscientious about even the smallest mistakes. There was a really interesting presentation that a music educator did on a similar subject to the parents of some state's all-state music education conference, but unfortunately I can't find it.
The gist of the presentation was that music requires a lot more perfection than many other fields. To cite an example, in school, a grade of 95% is considered generally to be a really good grade, but in music, if you miss 5% of the notes, the performance is downright awful. At the professional level, if you play a wrong note in a job audition, you get eliminated from the round. And of course, notes and rhythms are just the basics. Even if you're downright technically perfect, there are probably a bunch of other conservatory-trained auditionees that played the repertoire for the audition more musically than you did, so you still get eliminated. And that's just the process of landing an orchestral job. There have been conductors with top-tier orchestras that have fired people for playing a single wrong note in rehearsal (although generally in the professional world, it's understood that there will be mistakes and that basically nobody is perfect all the time).
We have a really brutal situation in orchestras right now where the boards of the orchestras are corporate-types who are extremely money-motivated, and oftentimes, they'll have a job audition but won't hire anyone at all (and everyone knows that it's because they don't want to pay for benefits, not because there aren't a TON of qualified conservatory grads out there). Probably, the competition factor carries over to mystery shopping too-- we're painfully aware that whenever we can do something well, someone else can do it way better. As a result, it's in our best interests to be as reliable as possible for schedulers, as clean as possible for the editors, and make the reports as useful to the client company as possible. If they think someone else can do it better, or if the shop report isn't worth a given amount of money, they'll start getting stingy about shop fees or prefer other shoppers.