ranunculus

Well, it has been a bit of a slog, but not too bad.  This is my first day off since Nov 6th.  In that time I had only three jobs, two of which were on the same payroll for the same company so I got one 7th day, and two 6th day paydays.  6th day is time and a half and 7th day is doubletime.
Job # 3 was for Michael, a really nice lighting designer who requested me.  When I left that job everyone was very happy with me which certainly strokes my ego.  Job #2 which I was on both before and after Job #3 was also very ego-boosting. Client took three of us senior crew people out to lunch yesterday.  I've reluctantly put my name back on the work list for Tuesday, when I hear that a Facebook is doing some kind of convention.

Today of course, I can barely move or think.  Got some bills paid (they tend to pile up when I'm working like this),  made/received some phone calls, like the one from my cattle guy who told me he would be moving cows to the Ranch next weekend and o, by the way did you get my rent check?  No I didn't.  Also got a call from Kim who was relaying a message from Tom that he had retrieved the "meteorite" from the place he had loaned it to and I could pick it up.  Apparently Tom's phone is not functioning right now (again).  I'm not sure that the "meteorite" is actually a meteor.  It is almost perfectly round, with melted bits.  A meteor would almost certainly not be round.  It was found in a creekbed, one rock among many washed out of our hillsides that clearly were once a lake or ocean bed.  I've never seen anything even remotely like bedrock on our place it is all just layers of rock and sediment.  I'll post pics in a couple of days.

Got a text yesterday from JoAnne saying that she emptied the rat trap, a water bucket, and that it had 7 rats in it!  That brings the total of rats that she personally has emptied out of the trap to around 20.  Arrrgh.  This week we are supposed to get some rain. That undoubtedly means we will loose that trap till it dries up next summer.  At least we are getting rid of some of them!
Tonight I'm going up to the Ranch to spread seed, fertilizer and straw around.  The straw is for erosion control, which some areas need badly.

I hear that the Iris Barn folks had a "Fun Day" with their horses yesterday.  Carrie organized some obstacles and they all had fun negotiating them and doing some desensitization exercises like picking up and waving a flag while mounted.  Not competitive at all.

Wellll, I've gone back to work.  The first five days of work, mostly 8 hr days, were well paid, but fraught.  The job was under-staffed so I was (supposedly)  the head electrician working directly with the lightboard operator. The lightboard op (Neil) really, really doesn't like me and, from my point of view, is a chauvinistic abusive control freak. Since he doesn't like me he doesn't speak to me (mostly). Needless to say it was not a pleasant first couple of days. After the first couple of days Neil went off to the front-of-house to run his board and left those of us who were glad to swap stories together. 
The boss wanted a lot of new cables marked, which kept me busy instead of terminally board with the parade of "motivational" speakers. I will say that it was kind of "cool" to hear Billy Jean King be interviewed.  She's a great person in my book. 

Off tomorrow to the next job.  Starts at 8am, finishes at 10pm.  Fortunately I'm just a crew person, not a head-of-department, so it should be fine, no extra mental effort involved. 

Donald is off to Ecuador  tonight for 2 weeks.  I'll miss him.

I went to the Union meeting last night.  Apparently the new, state-of-the-art Golden State Warriors arena is set to open next September.  There were glowing reports about the building and the amenities in it.  Imagine, freight elevators that go all the way to the Grid (the very top of the building) so chain motors can be transported up, walked over to a position and easily hung.  The chain from the motor can then be lowered by the motor to pick up the truss or scenic element below.  In most spaces,  riggers have to climb into the rafters, with harnesses on so they don't slip and fall, and painfully haul up all the materials needed to hang a chain motor, including muscling up the chain. In these cases the motor stays on the ground. Chains can be up to 80 or even 100 feet.  That is a LOT of weight to pull up to you.  When there are dozens of motors (called rigging "points") for a given show, the process is slow and takes a lot of people to do safely. 
The Golden State Warrior Arena is apparently booked for more than 200 days of the year for NON game events.  That is a huge, huge amount of work.  Wow.  The facility opening is scheduled for September.  September, when our local starts it's busiest three months of the year...

Not only that, but after being partially closed this year for a major renovation and addition,  Moscone Convention center is slowly re-opening all the spaces that were closed for renovation.  The new spaces are due to re-open in Dec of 2019.  In busy seasons our Local is already slammed and unable to process all the labor requests, I can't imagine what it will be like next fall!!  Even this spring should be a lot busier than it has been for the last two years. Heck, this fall we did an amazing amount of work, by far outstripping the busiest year on record. 

In other good news I went off to a job this evening that was the polar opposite of my job earlier in the week.  Happy crew, even after multiple long days.  Smiling boss who gave good, clear directions.  Oh, and I got to work up in the air in a lift with a really nice co-worker, so life was perfect!

On my way to work I dropped off a written complaint about my experience at the last job.  I had a good chat with one of the agents at the local, a guy I have worked with for the last 20 years who has also worked closely with the person I was complaining about.  After reading my complaint he commented that "you could see this coming".    My idea of a " best outcome" is that the guy I was complaining about gets some leadership training. I felt positive about my actions in this.

In stark contrast to my time with the film crew, today's work was with people I knew pretty well. There were four of us to set up a party in the newly renovated St Joseph's Church.  Some very rich guy bought the church, a lovely old building built in 1913 and severely damaged in the 1989 earthquake. At that time the parish was Filipino and in a very poor neighborhood. In 2008 the parish gave up fundraising efforts and sold the building.  All the news reports up through 2016 said the space would be turned into office space.  I wasn't clear why we had a very long call in a building that was supposedly renovated to be an office space, but you never know!
Today the building is in the hot "Soma" neighborhood, a block from Twitter headquarters.  The space isn't an office space of course, it is now an "Art" space.  I don't know how many million it cost to do a complete the very beautiful renovation, but it is pretty clear that money wasn't exactly an obstacle.  The renovation apparently used the architects drawings for the office renovation, but instead of office furniture they move in art pieces.  I didn't particularly care for the art, but it wasn't offensive in any way.  The party, described to us as "opening night" at the space on the other hand was downright wierd:

• Beautiful decorations showing a taste for antiques, Persian rugs and floral arrangements.: Check
• Guest list in the 300's : Check.
• Copious amounts of alcohol available (3 separate bars) apparently free: Check.
• Costumes and costume accessories available at the door.  Check
• Really good "Big Band" style group doing Sinatra covers: Check.
• Scantily clad singer doing a more Lady Gaga style song. Check.
• Drag Queens in enormous white outfits doing a bizarre lip sync dance. Check: Ok.
• Previous singer returns in red fetish-wear with gold chain in hand on the end of which is, apparently, her slave.  They do an erotic song.  Check.  Ok, really?
• More Drag Queen lip sync performances, most of them pretty good: Check  Thankfully everyone kept at least a reasonable amount of clothing on. 

The last performance started around 12:30 midnight.  We (the crew) had all been on the job since 8am.  The client had chosen to feed us so we had a "half hour" break every 5 hours or so, while remaining on the payroll. This might seem like a pretty sweet deal, but let me tell you "half's on the clock" really wear you down. Yes you get to refuel your body with food, but not rest.  A 20 minute nap is a really valuable thing, especially along about hour 12.    We spent 17 hours working today.  Yep, some of the content could be considered "titillating"  but who cares?  Along about hour 14 we don't!!

No, really, Union stagehands don't -usually- get sent out to jobs like this, but I'll take this party, where we were left alone to do our job, over the abusive, nasty call at the Civic a couple of weeks ago when we were disrespected and badmouthed. 

One long rant.  Please feel free to skip!!

Sunday I got a call from the Local.  Could I work on Wed & Fri.  Sure.
Tuesday I got a call: Can you work the same job, but  be head of Department Wed, Thur & Fri?  Sure, I guess. 

I complain about work conditions regularly.  I swear I'll stop.  This call definitely put "Bad" in perspective. 
On small jobs in hotels our employer(s) are often badly prepared and apt to leave it to the us to "design" the lights.  Usually this is 2 to 6 conventional lights pointed at a stage  in some little hotel meeting space  where someone is going to get up and talk to the audience and needs them to be able to see him.   No problem, it is one of dozens or hundreds of such shows we do each year.

This show was in our Bill Graham Civic Auditorium that holds 3,000 plus people.  There were 15 conventional lights and 56 moving light fixtures.  Conventional lights require electrical power, and they require a human to point them and, if needed, put a single piece of color in the holder in front of them.  Moving lights require power, an address, and a "data" cable that carries signal to them to tell them what to do.  Simple lights need 3 or 4 "channels" assigned to them.  Usually these control channels control something like red, blue and green signals.  As lights get more complicated they need more data channels; tip up and down, pan side to side, turn light on, turn it off, select a pre-loaded pattern, get bigger, get smaller and so on.  Really complicated lights might use 80 channels!!

So each light on a standard light plot has graphic symbol that shows what kind of light it is, numbers that correspond to: the light's position on the pipe, The cord it is plugged into for power, a  beginning data channel number, a color number if it doesn't change colors on it's own and so on. Reading this stuff seems complicated at first  but it makes total sense.

The piece of paper that lighting symbols are on (lighting plot) usually also shows where power cables start and give them a designation (A, B, C or even Sneezy, Dopy, Grumpy, Princess Leia.... ((yes I once worked a show that had cables so labeled, it was great, and easy to remember!))) along with specific measurements when needed.  Such plots are often 2.5 feet by 3 feet in size so it is possible to actually see it.

On Wednesdays show I was handed a 9.5 inch by 11 inch  piece of paper with colored symbols on it.  There were little pipe numbers on it and nothing else.  No indication of how it was to be plugged into power.  No channel numbers, nothing.  The client was demanding to know if "all their lights" were onsite.  After a minute of startled questions we counted lights on the "plot" and said no.  The light board operator looked up the power demands of each kind of light and figured out how to plug them in.  I desperately tried to keep my crew moving using the latest information and working with the equipment we had onsite.  Meanwhile the client was being rude and demanding. 

Eventually we got to the "front-light" a group of 12 conventional fixtures.  Normally lights of that kind have bulbs that are 575 to 750 watts along with lenses that concentrate the light to a appropriate size.  Lenses come in widths from 90 degrees to 5 degrees.  Think of a pizza.  90 degrees is 1/4 of a pizza.  45 degrees is 1/8th of a pizza.  My front-light fixures were 50 degree fixtures.  At 50 degrees the light covered 3/4 of the 60 ft wide stage.  I could barely see the light from these fixtures because their bulbs were 375 watts.  That is like trying to light a stage 60 feet away with a couple of big living room lamps.  Camera said No Way that isn't enough light.  I had to put all new bulbs in a dozen lights, and new, narrower lenses in most of them.  Meanwhile the client bitched.

Things just went from bad to worse.  We replaced multiple cables that came from the shop broken.  No one could tell us what the schedule was. The client raged that "Union labor" was to blame for things being messed up.  This wasn't just in lighting, ALL departments were apparently uncooperative and to blame. I told the client not to move the crates containing my lights and cable.  Despite this the client, took my carefully staged crates of equipment and "cleared" them from the space before we had finished unpacking them.  I had to go find them again and push the crates back to the stage.  In fact for much of one afternoon I walked back and forth trying to find things.  Thursdays step count was almost 24,000.

The show looked ok, but not good.  Power for the human operated followspots in the front-of-house tripped a breaker 10 minutes before show, mostly because the information we got about how much power the spot's needed was false (we did get them working). Audio and video had horrible, unresolved problems mostly due to having to use a mishmash of equipment that didn't interface well.

The client refused to make a plan for the strike/out and I was mad enough to ignore anything they said anyway.  I have very seldom been so glad that a show was over.  Load out day stretched to 19 hours on the clock.  At least I made a LOT of money!

Your average stagehand doesn't spend any time in the water at work.  Sure, we work in the rain sometimes, but not -in- the water.  Ok, so the movie folks sometimes have to work in water, but corporate events usually don't involve swimming pools.  My call at the Tonga Room was different. 
To begin with we don't usually work in the Tonga Room.  The Tonga Room is decorated as a Polynesian  Tiki Bar, complete with a boat in a "lagoon" (large swimming pool)  where it rains.  The room doesn't need much more decoration.  So of course the party planner for this event not only decorated it further, but added disco style party lights and a plexiglass platform IN the pool for the band to play on.  I have seldom been more glad that I'm an electrician not a carpenter.  The carpenters were in the cold water of the pool attempting to move 200# platforms into place.  Two of them had scuba tanks on. 
Here they are, the boat tied up in the background.  For reasons we didn't understand they started in the deep end of the pool. 



It was really hard work, but here they are further into the project:



This is the last decent pic I have, the deck is mostly done.  After they finished the platform they edged it with a railing.  Note the guy standing on the ratchet strap that is holding the underwater scaffolding to the sides of the pool. It took them a very, very long day to install everything.



Yesterday it took the carpenters a little over 2 hours to remove it all!!! 
Monday we get to install it all again, do another party with it before tearing it all out and putting it on the truck.  One of the crazier jobs I've been on.

Job chaos is really good for my pocketbook.  Yesterday I got asked to come back today for a "couple of hours" on the Palace Hotel job (we have a 5 hour minimum call).  Fine, said I, smiling.  The bank acct really needs re-filling after a very slow start to the year.  So today started at 11am.  At 3 they came by to get my order for dinner.  That meant that it wouldn't be a quick 4 or 5 hour job. Fine. Done by 6, right?  Wrong.  Done by 7?  Wrong.  I finally walked out at 7:45.  Meanwhile I'd gotten a call from the job from a couple of days back at the Intercontenental Hotel.  Could I come in at 7pm to move some lights and "set" a new room on Tuesday, a day I had not been scheduled to work?  Sure!  
I really hope Tuesdays job is short and sweet because Wednesday is going to be tough.  At 8am we have the load-out at the Intercontenental  Hotel (Tuesday night's job), and at 4pm the load-out of the Palace Hotel  job (today's job).  I -think- I can do both.....  but it is going to be a long day, especially since the Palace Hotel announced that we had to be out in 2 hours.  There is no way we will be clear of that room in 2 hours. 

Are you confused about the schedule yet?  Yep, me too.  Thank goodness for calendar programs!  Meanwhile I have no work past Wednesday. Hopefully that will change.  Extra hopefully it won't be a 6am start on Thursday.....

I think I foolishly suggested I was ready to go back to work.  ONE day back at work reminded me that work can be, well, very work like. 

Rant
We spent 11 hours installing a show with cheap, time consuming and sometimes unsafe equipment.  The company I was working for is a very large company who provides audio visual needs for (mostly) hotel clients.  They are so accustomed to using equipment geared for small rooms and minimal setups that they usually flail around creating chaos when faced with a bigger project.  Our project leader really tried on this one.  He created equipment lists and mapped out each of the 6 rooms we were working on.  He handed out this information to most of the crew (big, big brownie points for this).  Unfortunately he also forgot to mention a whole slew of stuff, like how rooms (and stages) changed during the run of the show.  So some 6 hours into our work day we finally got the information that one of the stages got 16 feet wider in the OPPOSITE direction indicated by the drawing.  OOps.  We were also working with itty bitty dimmers, each only really good for 3 lights.  We had to plug multiple  dimmer boxes into our power source, then network them together.  Really?  Why not just give us one good 12 dimmer unit?  Oh yes, that is because your company buys the cheapest, home DJ crap available and expects cheap labor to eventually make it work.  Because the equipment is meant to work with low wattage home lights, not high wattage stage lighting, AND it is very deceptively marked, the dimmers are often extremely overloaded.  Overloaded to the point of getting so hot you can't touch them.  NOT SAFE.  Sigh.  All I can do is the best I can to make things as safe as possible.
End Rant

Today was a day off.  Got the area for the new earthquake supply cabinet cleared out and some bricks laid down as a foundation.  The wood frame for the floor is screwed together.  Then it got cold and windy and I came indoors. 

Tomorrow off to AT&T ballpark to set up for a charity fundraiser.  Put on by a company that is usually pretty together....

 

In total it took 7 electricians more than 20 hours to load in this show.  Should have been done in 8.  Sigh. 
This morning the client was desperate for me to "get the lights focused"  So I went around in my boom lift and focused all the lights, generally on imaginary stages that might or might not move.  Another crew went around in a scissors lift (way, way easier to work out of for this kind of thing). The second crew added pipes to the trusses so the cables from the truss drop down next to the wall instead of in the seating area.  Sadly they were behind me.  The weight of the pipe rolled every single truss so all the lights were completely out of focus.  So I went BACK around with my awkward boom lift and refocused every single light.   I will just mention that the pipes should have gone on the truss while it was still down at floor level, at the same time we hung the lights. 
Eventually, at the end of the second day, the stages were placed.  At that point the client decided she hated our floor uplights and changed where they went.  Her placement left half of the 6' long striplight hanging off the edge of the stage.  The carpenters built little "legs' that we screwed the striplight feet (called trunions) to.  I thought it was a nifty solution.

Today was day three of this show.  Not much has changed, the stage manager is desperately dealing with poor equipment and problems while I'm sitting quietly making lights go on and off.  Wish I could refocus a couple of my lights....  
I swear that good, well organized shows exist.  I've seen lovely light plots, and worked for well prepared bosses.  Just not recently!