Some middle school band directors between early June and mid July be like...

[bloke]

... Here we are on Facebook on this vacation.
Here we are on Facebook at that vacation.
Here we are on Facebook at another vacation.

HEY SHOP, NOW THAT IT'S MID-JULY, WE NEED ALL THESE INSTRUMENTS REPAIRED BEFORE THE SECOND WEEK OF AUGUST WHEN SCHOOL STARTS !

(Of course you already had your entire summer schedule set up based on all the schools that had already sent in their instruments, but never mind that. This is me, and my students need their instruments!)

[gocsick]

Or Marching Band directors trying to order sousaphone neck and bits now... so they have them for band camp next week.

[bloke]

yup ..
The only people who still have them in stock at this late date are retailers who are asking 200 bucks.

Of course, it doesn't occur to band directors to check equipment back in a few days before school is out and hold grades until sousaphone necks and bits (and even bass clarinet necks) are brought back to the school...

... Is this stuff used as smoking apparati or something?

Related topic:
Conn-Selmer's dealer cost on King sousaphone pairs of tuning bits is now right around 100 bucks, and the jobbers are charging repair shops over a hundred and a quarter.
Finding used King tuning bits - due to the way that they are manufactured - is going to result in buying a pair from somebody for 50 or 60 bucks that leaks air.
Just bite the bullet and spend a big money on a new pair...and don't drop them.
Sand the lacquer off of the articulating portion to greatly decreased the likelihood of slippage.
For those who don't know, one bit is larger than the other. Required is one of each size.

[arpthark]

The benefit of living in the northeast is that most schools here start after Labor Day or a few days before, so I at least have until late August to get everything squared away.

Still waiting on the BD to give me the okay from their finance office to start everything (large truckload of mostly trumpets), so right now it's just taking up space. Although I have gone ahead and fixed the no-brainer stuff like all the stuck mouthpieces.

[bloke]

A few people are going to be triggered and interpret this as political, but there's undeniably a push towards year-round school.

What continues to sort of surprise me is that it seems to be less prevalent in the more progressive states than it is in the so-called conservative states.

Back before a zillion dollars was spent to air condition every school and mostly to bulldoze those which were set up with walls and walls of windows so they could somewhat cool themselves, our school (when I was even more naive and even more of a punk) began the day after Labor Day and ended the day before Memorial Day.
It had started creeping just a little bit when I started doing repairs about 45 years ago (once I realized that I need to enjoyed secondary school nor college level teaching), but it was still manageable. Now, there's no going anywhere in the summer on any type of even weekend jaunt. It's 7 days a week 12 hours a day of repair work until about the second week of August when the public schools open. The last ones to get their instruments from us are the middle schools, because they don't have marching band camp.
We might take a slight breather for a few days, but all of the big individual customer repair jobs have been piling up for months and all those people have been quite patient...
I'm not complaining about school repairs. We could simply do less of them, but we are still trying to recover from propping up a couple of our adult children (who aren't very capable for certain reasons) during the shutdown era when our own income dwindled.
I'm convinced that we do school repair work about as good as anyone. Almost no instruments are chemically cleaned, because all of the schools need so many instruments repaired and that would add a huge amount to their bills, which would exceed the amounts that they are maximally authorized to pay out to any individual business within a certain time period. I believe we knock out more dents then do most school repair shops, straighten out more valve problems properly, address more things that actually matter, and brace things up in proper ways that hopefully will at least hold up for a year regardless of how abused an instrument is. Perhaps bragging, we are also fast. Mrs bloke can take a bass clarinet that's covered with mold due to having been played at a rainy football game and put it back in the case, free up all the frozen mechanisms, and completely repad it (clean and shiny, and not just playing "good" but playing right) and have it back in the case in less than a day. I'm the same way with trashed tubas, even if I have to pull them apart into pieces. Obviously, I spend more time on professional instruments because they need to be more like 99% instead of 90% - regarding cosmetic damage (denting)... Then again, most professional instruments aren't usually trashed (other than 186's which were formerly school instruments). Mrs bloke is always deluged with harmony woodwinds, because they actually come back from her playing as they should. (There's actually one repair person in the area - when their woodwind repairs are hard blowing due to being leaky - who refers to young, small, or female players of woodwinds as not having a strong enough "grip". )

[MiBrassFS]

.

[bloke]

So, these people don’t surrender the school’s instruments for repair during the last week or so of the school year? My wife’s school building is completely shut down during the entire month of July. Can’t even get in the place. Why the heck do these people want to be fussing with such nonsense in July?

Some of them seem sensible and act sensibly, but others just run out of the school building on the last day of school screaming along with the students and head to Florida (which doesn't make any sense to me, because it's hotter than hell here in the summer and it's even hotter in Florida).