What kind of day is it?

I don't think I'll ever be able to walk into a space in the morning and tell you what the day's going to be like. I mean that in the most basic sense, that I just can't tell, at 8am, whether at lunchtime I'll be where I want to be. There are too many factors involved that are beyond my control.

Once, I discovered that the local crew had, instead of using the paperwork provided as part of the advance, created their own instrument schedule for the purpose of documenting circuits. Needless to say, I was, and still am, confused by that. They had gone so far as to rename positions (which is especially baffling, to me) pretty extensively.

My immediate course of action was to ask them to print out a copy of my instrument schedule and transfer circuit information. Well, they printed out the channel hookup, which didn't make the job easier for the girl they had doing the copying. It was then we discovered that the house-created paperwork had at least a few errors in it, such as specials being listed in two positions. When they handed me my channel hookup and I started my patch. Once I started checking channels, stuff just wasn't right, it didn't make the transition from paper to paper well.

The point of this is that here was a day that was going pretty well, my mover hang was fast and relatively uncomplicated, cabling wasn't a huge headache to deal with, my sound towers got hung pretty quickly and I even had my full balcony rail position, but now I had to have the electrician do a dimmer check. Once we got the circuits sorted out, they powered through what was probably the fastest focus I've ever had, and I knocked out my mover focus and we were more or less ready to go with plenty of time, in spite of a 7pm curtain.

Up until the trouble reared its head, I had no reason to believe this wouldn't be my best day yet, and it almost could have been, even in a challenging space. At the end of the night the crew set a record for load-out, the TD nailed a great pack on the truck and we were out of there. There was just that one little difficulty that no one could have expected that was the wrench in the works.

Admittedly, the fluid and unpredictable nature of the business is part of its allure for me, but sometimes I wonder if I'll ever get to a point where this kind of completely unexpected speed bump won't phase me too much.

Tomorrow, I hear, our space is going to be challenging. We'll see how it goes. Until next time.