United Methodists and Fun and Shit
The United Methodists came to Calvin today to set up for their Summer 2009 shindig. It is quite a production, with between 800 and 1000 people in attendance. Basically, the setup day was a cluster fuck. When I arrived at work, everything seemed to be collapsing around the heads of the crew that was already there. Apparently, barely anything had been finished, and the pace was going much slower than expected. Added to this the propensity of the conferees to get in the way of any legitimate work going on, and you have a nice recipe for disaster. The major issue appears to be our facility, which for all intents and purposes was never finished correctly. A few of the mic lines were not actually connected properly at a patch bay, and most everything requires extensive tweaking to get to actually work. The first brilliant event that I participated in was the missing of a training session on the SMART classroom. I guess we were supposed to show up or something. Fortunately, nobody did, and it was rescheduled for an hour later. When the people got there to teach a bunch of techies how to use a computer, we were watching youtube and playing music and stuff. Go figure. Next, after wasting our time at a training session, we proceeded to go waste more time trying to get stuff done in the arena itself. Basically, the story of the day was the sound system not working, and me putzing around in the catwalks trying to focus lights on stuff that seemed to never stay in the same place for more than 5 minutes. After I took a dinner break, I discovered that instead of cuing and programing the event, I would be helping a bunch of video people put in their equipment (old pieces of shit), because they didnt want to rent the brand new, HD gear that Calvin has installed. More time wasted. Finally, the video people left (course, the job wasnt done, but who’s counting?), and I figured that I would be able to actually do some real work. False. Stupid choir practice. Once my shift was technically over, I got around to actually programing the lighting system, and making all the things work, including the house lights, which pleased me much. Hopefully, we wont show up in the morning to find a completely different stage set. Would be about par for the course today though.
But then I hung out with Jessie so everything was okay.
