Daylight Losing Time

I walked down the hall of my school at 3:30 on Thursday. Outside the sky was blue and the temperature was in the upper 50s.  A beautiful sunny afternoon beckoned, pulling me toward the parking lot and my car and my home and my wife and a walk with our dog and just then a text arrived on my phone.

“Hey, Mike the Mic Guy is here.  Are you able to meet with him?”

I’m helping in the sound and light booth for our play at school, and M the M Guy provides the body mics and various other sound equipment that we use for the show.  I was expecting him on Friday, not Thursday, but if this meant that I didn’t have to have a Friday meeting after school, I was okay with him showing up a day early.

Mike’s a very nice person, and he knows a lot about the equipment and how to work the sound board and how to hook things up and how to adjust the sound and how to troubleshoot our problems…and how to talk.  Since I really do not know a lot about those things, I greatly appreciate him coming to set things up.  Yesterday he was dropping off a new spotlight that we’ll be using in the show.  It’s very cool, and he was impressed with the price we got and it uses LED lights instead of gels and you can just press a button and it switches from green to cyan and you press another button and it switches to red and oh yeah up on the top is the slider that controls the aperture and this button here turns it into a strobe if you hold it for three seconds, but you may not want to use it in that mode for too long what with the seizures that sometimes occur and this dimmer, well, you know you just press the plus or minus and it controls the level of brightness and I just can’t figure out how this tripod attaches more securely to the post here but maybe if you read the manual you can figure that out because I don’t usually read manuals since I’m more of a fiddle until you figure it out kind of person.

Mike didn’t have the body mics on Thursday.  He was just planning to drop off the new spotlight, but it seemed that he was glad to have someone to talk with for the next two-and-a-half hours.  He informed me that he was still planning to come back on Friday, but what was this about parent-teacher conferences?  Were they still having them tomorrow because if it worked for me he could come by earlier to drop off the body mics and we could troubleshoot whatever was wrong with the ones that you guys bought that I really wouldn’t have bought if you had asked me because although the brand that we got is a good name, this particular model is kind of a cheap product and isn’t really made by that company they just get it from China and put their name on it, but I guess they’ll work okay even though a receiver like this doesn’t have an external antenna so you’re going to have to keep it here in a direct line toward the stage if you want it to get a clear signal.  Anyway we can set those up, but if you can find the manual it might be easier and we can try to get those handhelds working, but do you really need to use handhelds if you have the eleven body mics? You know at Staples the show they’re doing uses 21 body mics, but they have a mic dedicated to each actor so they can use the pocket kind that they attach to the body instead of clipping on like yours and of course the microphone part is attached here to their cheek so it’s very close to their mouth as opposed to yours which are usually clipped to the front of their costume down here below their chin where it’s harder for the mic to pick up their voices which is why you were sometimes having to turn up the gain and that sometimes led to the distortion or the feedback you were talking about.  Anyway, we can set those up tomorrow.  I’ll meet you here at 1:30.  

So, if you think that was the end of our talking, you’re off by a few hours.  I didn’t experience much of that sunny Thursday afternoon.

A part of me thought that maybe if I met Mike at 1:30 on Friday, I’d be able to make a relatively early getaway that afternoon.  That part of me is sometimes referred to as the naive part of me. 

On Friday, we met at 1:30.  We managed to set up the eleven body mics.  We fixed the problem with the handheld mics.  We played with the delay speakers in the auditorium.  We set up the monitor speakers that sit on the stage facing the actors so they can hear the music.  That part consisted of approximately one hour of work.  I learned quite a bit about the soundboard in that time.  Mike is a very knowledgeable and helpful person.  I may have mentioned that he also likes to talk. 

And that’s why our one hour of work was spread thinly over three-and-a-half hours of real time.  I finally extracted myself from the sound booth when I received a phone call from my wife wondering if she should wait for me or take the dog for a walk by herself because she had remembered hearing from that naive part of me that I was probably going to be home early on Friday afternoon.  

Sigh.  Fortunately my wife and my dog are patient, and the daylight savings thing allowed us to have a nice walk when I finally got home.  

Mike’s dropping off the walkie talkies and the headsets on Monday.  I’m planning to be in another part of the building in a very important meeting.

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