The worst part of the job

The Hardest Call I Have to Make

Somebody has to decide when a person no longer gets to be here. That somebody is me. I hate it every single time and I have stopped waiting to get used to it.

By Dan Pearce, founder of The Clay Hole. This one started life as a script for a video. It got longer.

Illustration of a studio owner calmly confronting a scowling member at the wheel while other members work happily together in the background

Wanna know the most frustrating, most difficult part of running a giant pottery studio?

It’s knowing when to kick somebody the hell out.

And then actually doing it.

It always feels like I’m playing judge, jury, and executioner all at once, in a beanie, with clay under my fingernails.

Keeping this community full of good-souled, ever-trying humans is the single most important thing I do in here. More important than the kilns. More important than the glaze wall. More important than any of the shiny stuff people come for.

Because one person can take down dozens.

That isn’t hyperbole and it isn’t me being dramatic. I have watched it happen. One person quietly spreading their thing in the background can end memberships, cost me staff, and turn a room that used to hum into a room where everybody keeps their head down.

The tricky part is that it’s slow. It’s a leak, not a burst pipe. By the time it reaches me it has usually been running a while.

It almost always follows the same road.

It starts with whispers. Little murmurs about how strict or unfair or stupid some rule of mine is.

Then it moves to money. Quiet remarks to classmates about what things cost and what I must be pocketing.

Then come the shots at me. Small ones. A comment about a quirk.

Then the quirks stop being quirks, and everything I do gets recast as malicious.

Then it turns on other members. Pot shots about people, delivered to other people.

That last one is usually when it finally lands on my desk. Somebody overhears it and has finally had enough.

By then a lot of damage is done, and most of that damage is unfixable, because there is no way to ever know how far it went. I only ever see the part that surfaced.

Here’s the thing that gets me the most, though.

It’s almost always delivered with an enormous smile.

The kind of toxicity that sneaks into a place like this is rarely loud. It’s warm. It’s friendly. It has excellent eye contact and a well-practiced performance of caring, and it will hug you on the way out the door.

Ew. It gives me the ick just typing it.

It is a leak, not a burst pipe. By the time it reaches me it has usually been running a while.

And then I finally figure it out, and I have to do the part I hate most.

I have to cancel a person. And then just hope.

Hope they don’t do anything crazy.

Hope they don’t go on a rampage in a group chat.

Hope they don’t turn up to class and make a scene.

Hope they don’t come back and break somebody’s pottery.

Hope the rest of my members trust me, even though I will never be able to tell them why.

Hope, honestly, that the person getting the boot doesn’t get hurt too badly by it.

That last one surprises people.

But somebody doing this to a room is almost always hurting like hell themselves. That’s usually the whole engine of it. I don’t love adding to somebody’s worst year, even when they’ve spent three months making mine harder.

Anyway.

I’ll keep doing it. I’ll keep watching for it and I’ll keep making the call.

My members do not come here to sit in a stranger’s misery. They come here to get away from all of that for a couple of hours. If I let one person turn this into another room where you have to manage somebody, then I’ve failed at the only thing this building was ever for.

Of everybody who has come through these doors, I’ve had to do it a tiny number of times. Single digits. And every single one of them lives rent free in my head.

There’s a reason the energy in here is what it is. It isn’t luck and it isn’t the lighting.

A whole lot of weeds will choke out the flowers. But a whole lot of flowers will also choke out the weeds.

That’s what’s happening in here. I’d like to keep it that way.

So. To my members.

You’re the flowers. All of you. Every last gorgeous, weird, clay-covered one of you.

You keep doing your thing. My team and I will stay two steps ahead of the rest of it.

And do me one favor. When somebody has to go, and you notice they’re gone, and you never get an explanation out of me?

Trust that I had a whole pile of damn good reasons.

I’ve got your backs. Thanks for having mine.

Dan Pearce

Founder of The Clay Hole, Fellow Human

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Dan Pearce, author, artist, and potter, at work on pottery at The Clay Hole studio in Draper, Utah

About the author

Dan Pearce

Founder of The Clay Hole · Draper, Utah

Dan Pearce is an author, artist, and the founder of The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah. Before pottery, he spent a decade as one of the most-read bloggers in the world. His blog, Single Dad Laughing, ranked #2 among personal blogs worldwide and drew more than a billion reads before he retired it in 2020. He has published six books, including the memoir The All-Important, Well-Fed, Giant White Man, and built an audience of more than three million followers. He has also worked professionally as an animal artist, illustrator, body painter, and poker player. Not in that order, and yes, all of those are real.

In 2022 he launched Dan Pearce Ceramics, known for one-of-a-kind pieces he has never once duplicated, and every sale went toward building The Clay Hole: 10,000 square feet, more than a million dollars invested, and a community of hundreds of members built from the ground up to put people first. Of everything he has made in twenty-five years of chasing creative work, he considers the community the best of it.

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