42 Day One

Today we left the hotel at 7:15am and arrived back around 11:45pm for a nice 16+ hour day. Some highlights and low lights of the day-

We parked the trucks. Well the drivers did. It's a tough job to get the trucks exactly where they need to be so the stairs and porches work, as well as all of the rear access doors to the equipment, just in case. Parking was interrupted because the field had to move outside 2 hours earlier than it was originally scheduled. When the field moves in or out, there is a cease and desist of about 80-90 minutes with anything going on by where the field moves to and from. This will get to be very annoying. We took this opportunity to get lunch.

When I saw the VP, the first words out of his mouth were "I hope these fucking generators work." He loves to drop the F-bomb. We usually have bets as to how long it will take for the first f-bomb of the day.

The floors of the trucks are filthy from being in Green Bay last week (and Dallas the week before didn't help). We cleaned the floors, first by hand to get the top layer of salt and grime off, and then we used the Oreck Orbiter that we have on the trucks. We actually have 2 of them to help things go quicker. Unfortunately, one them is broken, so we have to share the one for 4 of the trucks. As soon as we turned it on, this one started making really bad noises, and it broke also in the middle of waxing one of the trucks.

Next up, we installed 4 of the 5 EVS's we need to add for this show. Frosty was sent to Scottsdale to grab the 5th one from another truck. While on his way out there, he got a flat tire on my rental car. He couldn't figure out where the jack was or how to get the spare tire down so he ended up calling Roadside assistance AFTER being on the side of the road and trying to figure it out himself for 2 hours. SIX hours later, he finally made it back with the equipment we needed. This really lengthened the day.

When we opened up the D-Unit, we found some really bad things- First, two speakers had fallen onto one of the submix audio consoles. One of the speakers suffered severe damage and will definitely need to be replaced. The audio console has suffered major damage as well and will need to go out for repair. This isn't NEEDED for this show, but would have been nice to have. Second, the large LCD in the viewing room has a scratch on it. This wasn't there when we left the truck in June. One of the DSS receivers is just missing. Not sure where that one ended up.

Some equipment shipping in got screwed up and we never received it. That slowed things down a bit also.

We moved three Wohler speaker monitors from Graphics to Tape for the added positions we have in there. We installed 4 new CCU's in Video. We added a UPS on one of the tally controllers so it'll survive power changes better. We installed a DVC Pro in the Edit truck.

I have a 3 page list of to-do's and I got NONE of them done today. I think tomorrow will be a long day as well. I have a 6am wake up call, so it's time for bed now.