Pens 1, Roma's 0

Last night the Pens scrapped and clawed their way to a triple-overtime win against the Redwings to stay in the Stanley Cup Finals. It was an amazing game. Fleury is the hero as far as I can tell.

I watched the game at Roma's, a bar in Sewickley that features "Mug Night" every Monday (gotta have a handle, can't have a spout, and they'll fill it for $2.75). What was even more amazing than the game was that the manager on duty decided that since he was paying the DJ $200 to be there and would have to answer to his boss the next day for the wasted money if the DJ wasn't utilized, the DJ was going to play music during the third overtime instead of going back to the game after intermission.

I kid you not.

So really quickly we had a really heated situation. One guy actually went after the DJ. The cops were called. The manager realized he had made a mistake but now he had staked out his territory, and it's hard to back down, you know?

Now, I grew up in this town, and was in the same class with this guy, the manager, since about 4th grade (though we're only aquaintances). So I tried to intervene (as did others), but it was too little too late. He was calling his boss when the fight broke out and he dropped the phone. Thankfully the Pens won, and all's well that ends well, I suppose. But, wow! Intense!

Plenty of brain spinning since then and wanted to record some ideas on conflict resolution for next time:

• Situations develop quickly; gotta respond quickly.
• Complex situations have a lot of actors (here we had the manager; long-time patrons supporting the manager; most patrons, upset and confused; some of the manager's friends who were pissed at him; the most belligerent patrons, who were "outsiders"; a couple peace-makers; cops), and there are really multiple conflicts going on.
• Look for a central conflict (might not be one?) and try to resolve that one first.
• The quickest way to de-escalate a conflict is for one party to apologize and for the other party to accept it and apologize back.
• If the other party doesn't apologize back, then it demands much more of the first party to maintain their apology, but if they can then that is the second-best resolution.
• In the absence of repentance, find a solution that saves face for both parties.

Unless you know one of the parties in the conflict well enough to say, "Hey, man, you know the best way out here is for you to apologize," then your best option is to find a creative solution that transcends the situation. And this is where I screwed up. You see, for this and that reason, I was wearing a ridiculous fez that I wasn't allowed to take off:



What I should have done was to take off the fez and "pass the hat," collecting the $200 to cover the DJ and converting all of the group's energy to a positive cause. The signs were all there but I screwed it up. Man am I kicking myself this morning.

Sorry, Roma's. And thank God the Pen's won! Feed back to Chad Whitacre.