Nem·e·sis
1capitalized : the Greek goddess of retributive justice
Of all the shows we do and especially of the ones we do annually, the only one I dread is basketball. It's the most work. It's got the most set-up. I put in the most hours. And of all our events, it the most likely to kick my ass.
If I'm on TV, it's almost never a good thing.
A couple years ago we were doing the NCAA regionals. LSU was playing someone and midway through the first half the bloody horn stuck on. This isn't all that uncommon in basketball and most people who watch the sport have seen it on TV before. How many of you have considered though the poor schmuck who is responsible for that system?
I don't know which of my sins earned it for me but somehow, I'm that guy.
I'm the one who's on TV looking rattled and checking wires while the TV announcers fill time with unflattering comments about how "Georgia Tech is just up the road and maybe they have some engineers up there who can sort this out."
We'd just gotten a new HDTV at home and when my wife called me to console me after seeing this on TV she quipped "In HD, you look a lot more stressed."
This is what I think about when people say "Oh, that's COOL! Do you get to go to all the games?" after hearing where I work. I think of the national championship women's basketball game being in an unscheduled break because system I'm responsible for has just gone totally off the deep end with all the boards blinking and buzzing away for no reason and I don't have a clue why or if I can fix it. There was 1:46 left on the clock. Why couldn't it just have run out?
SEC Men's basketball championship tournament, right after we let the people in on Thursday morning we had a failure in green digital audio processing box (know the one?). It decided it was done working and left us with a very nice ear-splitting high-pitched audio shriek throughout the PA system. Fantastic. I'd just said out loud how things were going fine so far (mistake #1).
I ran to Front Of House but my A1 had already left for the control room to mute the amps. I was getting hounded on the house radio about what was going on and when it would be fixed. I didn't know the answers so I left the radio at FOH and ran up the six flights of stairs to the amp room. Out of breath but full of adrenalin, I did a quick survey and left the room to call the A1 on the "show" radio I was still carrying. See, the radio dosen't work in the amp room for some reason.
Right back to the room to see what's going on now but...I locked the keys inside. (mistake #2)
The full volume shrieking still painfully audible, even way up here, I kicked the door in frustration.
It bent.
"Hmmm" I thought "I can kick the door in! just a couple more kicks and I'm in. We can deal with the door later, it's MUCH more important to stop this racket and fix the PA system..."
There were many lessons that day:
I can not kick-in a 3-hour rated fire door.
If you don't have your house radio with you, it's much harder to call for help when you're in trouble.
If a door bends enough you won't be able to open it when the key finally arrives.
Carpenters on staff are often a Godsend.
Repeatedly kicking virtually immovable objects really hard is not good for your body.
In an emergency, you are likely to forget about the one amplifier whose computer control card isn't on the network properly.
It's a good idea to use the building's computer network infrastructure to port the amplifier control network to your FOH position so you can mute quickly if you have to.
I could go on and on telling stories about unfortunate events that have occurred to us during basketball shows. Hell, I didn't even mention the tornado we had last year or the time I got booed by 20,000 people on my birthday. But you get the point.
It's with a certain sense of doom and a weary eye that I view the approach of March Madness each year. It's precisely these events though that have taught me some very good lessons about how to approach the job we do so as not to get burned next time.
After that fiasco at the SEC tournament, once the panic had worn off and the juices simmered down, I got to thinking. We've been doing these events for years and years now and we learn lessons almost every time. Some times they're hard earned war wounds and some times they're little things we might have to learn again next year. What I'd like to know though is how the heck we ever got through one of these things years ago BEFORE we got so much "Experience"...
Anyway, I better get to bed. Basketball is on the horizon again and I'm going to need my rest.
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