The summer vacation season is slowly coming to an end.

To the delight of Patric Hartung, because while others are relaxing on vacation, the 33-year-old and his team have to look after more than 100 cars.

“Schülerspezialverkehr” is the name of the area in which his employer has specialized.

The drivers bring pupils to various special needs schools and pick them up again.

Hartung runs the workshop.

Benjamin Fischer

Editor in business.

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"Cleaning up, replacing parts, TÜV inspection - everything possible has to be done during the holidays," says Hartung. Sometimes there are also unpleasant surprises like the lunch ration of several weeks under one seat. In addition, there are always trucks and around 10 vans in the yard for courier trips of all kinds Respect applies.

At the end of August he will go to Hanover for a few days. The Kassel Huskies training camp is coming up. For the second division ice hockey team, he is the second team supervisor on match days. “But I only do the first few days so that I get to know the team.” Apart from the work in the workshop, nothing more is possible, and most of the team stayed together after the missed promotion last season. A dream for the ice hockey fan - which, ironically, would hardly have come true without the corona pandemic. Because Hartung has actually been hiring out for years as a tour manager for hardcore bands like Obey The Brave or Deez Nuts. No superstars who fill arenas, but fixed sizes in their genre, which every evening in Europe attract up to 1000 fans and sometimes even more.In mid-March 2020 a France tour would have been scheduled, which was canceled one day before the start, as he reported to the FAS at the time.

"The job saved me"

Since then, the concert world has largely stood still.

Especially for someone like Hartung, who works primarily with international bands.

All the better that he has held the full-time position as workshop manager since autumn 2019, after having worked there for several years on the side.

"The job saved me," says Hartung, "even when the country was pretty much dense and we were all on short-time work, we worked normally in our small team - otherwise I would have been bored to death."

Nobody in the workshop is a trained car mechanic, Hartung himself has learned from Maurer: "We do it our way, and if I have learned one thing in six years of tour management, then always keep an overview and coordinate everything." For Everything that they couldn't do, he now had a good connection to three specialist workshops in the area, to which he could bring cars.

Hartung has known his boss since he was two years old.

That also enabled him to keep on going.

"Since I've been working permanently in the workshop, I've done eight tours," says Hartung, looking back.

They always organized it in such a way that it worked without any problems.

Sometimes with unpaid leave, sometimes with regular - “as long as everything works in the workshop, it works”.

What unites professional athletes and musicians

The assignment as a team supervisor was correspondingly unproblematic, especially since Hartung is only present here on the match day. His path to ice hockey and that of the tour manager are in some ways similar: Both times he started as a fan. In the case of music, he initially uploaded concert pictures from hardcore shows on his Myspace page. Soon he was taking photos for a small online music magazine, and then a while later for an organizer who at some point asked him whether he would like to become a stage manager at his concerts and, as such, ensure that everything runs smoothly. Through this part he automatically came into contact with a wide variety of artists until, after some time as stage manager, he was booked as tour manager for the first time. "Classic word-of-mouth propaganda," he calls it.