the first to the venue, the last to the van

road blog - Philly: day 2

back to business as usual today - 4:30am wakeup call for our 5:30am call time to sit and wait to be told when to hurry up to wait some more. ah, meetings.

Yesterday was all load in and set up and we spent most of it spinning our wheels and going in circles before finally getting everything as ready as it can be and calling it a night. Not a bad day, just draining.

There's a show in the venue right after we load out tomorrow, as in the venue scheduled them to be loading in while we're loading out, so they contacted us and asked if we could work together to make the whole thing easier. Really what that means is easier for them since our shit was already taken care of, but there's no sense in not helping since we had the time and the deal they were talking about wasn't a bad one, on paper.
Basically they needed to put up a much more elaborate lighting rig than we were going to so they offered to come in a day early and put their lights up and let us use them for our show so we get better lights and they don't have to try and hang a rig in 2 hours while we're loading out. Sounds fine. Until you remember that we had lighting to do our show just fine and didn't need this headache.

so they showed up late, which meant we spent a good amount of time just stalling since we couldn't build the staging, the curtains, run cables for sound or anything else until these guys were done (since they were driving a lift and moving a lighting rig right through everything) but they showed, got their gear in and we went to lunch while they got started - came back to find that not only were they not going to finish in anything close to the time they said but they seemed to have forgotten we were doing them a favor in the process.
We noticed that all the lighting controls for their stuff was run to a small area in the back of the venue, exactly 65 feet from our tech table and where it should be. When we pointed this out the guy actually said "yeah, this is how your room is gonna be...." and started to explain how we were going to have to re-arrange our setup.

The lead on our crew not-so-gently reminded him that
1. they had talked about where things were supposed to go
2. we were helping them out, and screwed our entire day to do so
3. they don't get to come in a tell us how things are going to be unless they want to get back up and start taking things down again.


in the end this isn't that interesting a tale, just a recap of a day that could have ended 4 hours earlier if we hadn't screwed it up trying to be nice and help out someone else. Now we get to go run the show, with very nice lights, which means lots of sitting and waiting punctuated by moments of total panic. Should be fun. I don't think we'll be doing anyone anymore favors though.