On a recent afternoon, I walked through a busy intersection in downtown Atlanta.
The glass speaker was the only thing on the sidewalk.
But a few hundred feet away, a handful of people sat on plastic chairs and stacked boxes of plastic boxes of glass.
A few dozen more people stood around the glass table, their hands in the air.
On the far side of the street was an outdoor bar that served craft beers.
In the window of the bar, a neon sign read, “We are the new beer festival.”
But as I approached the bar and walked in, I saw an empty table.
It was empty.
The people were already gone.
I sat down, and the sound of music filled the space.
A guy with a microphone was playing the music from his speakers, while another was singing along.
I asked a man sitting next to me, “What the hell is going on?”
He told me, in a low voice, “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
The next day, I visited a restaurant and met a couple of people who had been there the previous day.
They told me they had been drinking at the bar for three hours before getting their glass organizer.
They said they had gotten so drunk that they thought they were getting kicked out of the venue.
I talked to the man at the restaurant and he said, “That’s the worst thing you can ever do to someone.”
The two people I talked with at the table were both in their early 30s, and both were drinking a lot.
The man who got his glass organizer said he felt like he had just been thrown out of his hotel room.
When I asked him if he was upset, he said he wasn’t.
“I can’t say that,” he said.
I also talked to another woman who was drinking at a nearby bar that night.
She said she was not upset at all.
“The best thing you could do is take a shower,” she said.
She added, “People have this attitude that you can’t drink and stay sober.”
At one point, I asked another woman at the party if she was upset about her glass organizer being stolen.
She told me that she was, but that she wasn’t mad.
“We don’t really get it,” she told me.
“People think it’s a bad thing that someone’s going to take their stuff.”
The first glass organizer was a one-time project of a local business owner.
When the owner realized the glass organizer’s location was in an empty building, he began building a bigger speaker.
This time, he did not buy a large speaker.
Instead, he rented the speakers to people he knew from his previous job.
As he built the speakers, he also started making new speakers for his new patrons.
And while he was working on these speakers, the bar’s owners became aware of his business and asked him to cancel his previous event.
He declined.
And that was the end of the business.
A year later, a different business owner began to use the speakers.
He rented them out to people who didn’t know that the speakers had been stolen.
A woman at a bar in a neighboring neighborhood told me she was the one who asked the bar owners to cancel the event.
She explained that the bar was only hosting a small event.
And when she and her friends saw the speaker thieves, they became so upset that they told the bar managers to take the speakers back.
The bar managers did not take them back, and when the bar owner returned, he found the speakers missing.
“They took them all back and didn’t give them back,” the bar manager told me later.
The next time the bar lost a glass organizer, the owner decided to go to the bar to find the missing speakers.
As soon as he left the bar with the speakers and found the missing speaker, he took the speakers out of their boxes.
Then he drove back to the restaurant to retrieve the speaker.
“He told me I was going to have to take these speakers back,” she recalled.
“That night, I started to get very angry.”
A week later, the glass organizers were gone, too.
This is what I learned from the experience.
If you’re a glass artist and want to get your speakers in front of people, you should plan for the worst.
The more you have to worry about theft, the less likely you are to get them back.
It can be hard to understand what happens when a glass speaker gets stolen, but a common misconception is that people take their glass out of boxes, then put it in their mouths and drink.
This isn’t true.
A glass speaker should never be left unattended.
Glass makers can use a variety of safety measures to keep their speakers safe.
One way is to wrap a rubber band around the speakers for protection.
A metal strip can be added to the bottom of the speakers so that it’s no longer exposed to the elements.
Some glass makers also use metal
