There's a sign posted on the wall of the shop at Upstaging Lighting that says, "If you arrive right on time for load in, you're late." These words are gospel; I have never been late to a call time in all my years. And I have zero tolerance for anyone who isn't there to meet me on time. A Spanner in the Works
The business of doing shows depends on time. Budgets are drawn out months before a show by people who try to take into account how long the preparation time for a show will take so they can bill properly for it and make a profit. The lighting rental company must know how many man-hours it needs to pay to prep a system going out. A production company must anticipate how many days and hours it will take to load in an event. If one player in the whole process does not show up on time, it can throw a wrench into the whole works.
It's been long accepted that the lighting people are the first in and the last out at any show. They tend to work the longest hours and receive the least overtime for most shows. This is especially true for live concert lighting techs. These guys get zero overtime. They generally work a 16-hour day with just a few hours off every afternoon – if nothing breaks that day. Then they repeat the process for days on end. Everyone has a designated thing they do each day, and if one person were to sleep in, a load in could really slow down.
T-Minus Two Hours
Nowadays, it's widely accepted that you should arrive at the airport two hours before the departure time. There is no sign that Homeland Security will speed up the screening process and the lines at the counters can be brutal, even with self check-in. Yet people in our biz are still missing their flights for lack of preparation, not snow emergencies. If you know it's going to snow the next day, plan to leave home an hour early. It isn't rocket science.
Last year, I requested that a particular young kid come tech a show for me. He was college-trained and educated, he had done a few shows for me before, and I liked him. While prepping the show, a couple other techs told me in passing that this guy has a bad habit of missing flights. So I went up to him and explained that there is no legitimate excuse for him to miss a flight, barring a visit to the emergency room. He nodded in understanding. The next evening, as the crew was boarding the plane, I noticed he was not among us. I pulled out my phone and jingled him.
He was waiting in line to check baggage, which meant he was going to miss this plane, and it was the last flight out. I informed him that our load in time was at 8 a.m. sharp. I didn't care how he got there, but made it quite clear that if he was one minute late, he would never do another gig with me and I would tell the owners of the lighting company that he was a screw up. To my knowledge, he slept on the floor of the airport, caught a 6 a.m. flight and arrived just in time for work. Had he not been there on time, I would have been forced to cover his ass and spend less time dealing with my usual lighting designer politics. The day would've been a lot longer for everyone.
The Missing Idiot
Corporate events are all about strict schedules. Guest speakers have to rehearse. CEOs have to practice reading off teleprompters while constantly changing their scripts. Musical guests are allowed just so much time in a day to set up their gear, program the lights and do a sound check. All it takes is one missing idiot to screw up your day. Here's a great example.
Two years ago, I got a frantic call from my partner. He was in New Orleans with one of his acts who was providing the entertainment for a convention. A lighting company from New Jersey brought all the equipment and techs to do the show. Mike had a four-hour window from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. to program his lighting cues and focus the specials. But he was fuming. The tech, some guy with a silly French nickname, failed to show up. He decided it was more important to go out drinking in the Big Easy on a Saturday night than to look after his client the next morning.
Mike was now an hour behind and has to work, so he took the liberty of turning on the lighting system and console, but nothing was working. He couldn't call the company in Jersey because it was Sunday, so he asked me for advice. I quickly deduced that the opto-splitters were not powered up, thus the lights were seeing no signal from the controller. Soon he was off and running. He had some local guys focus the key lights while his programmer started with the movers. They pulled the show off, but my partner was pissed at the quality because he had to cut short his programming for a scheduled general session that took over the room at 2 p.m. Needless to say, one crappy tech made this lighting company look really bad. I'd be surprised if they kept the gig the next year.
Never Assume
This week, I had to do a gig in a faraway land. I got in a cab at my house at 1 p.m. and arrived at my hotel precisely 26 hours later. Burnt to a crisp, I really needed some shuteye. But as we checked into the hotel, the production manager said, "Everyone in the lobby in 10 minutes; we're gonna go check out the gig." The last thing I wanted to do is go for a walk through to make sure everything I had advanced was in place. But it's my job, and in our biz, we should "Never Assume" that everything is perfect.
Sure enough, I got there, and the lighting rig was different than the drawings I submitted. The video walls were in the wrong place. The console was different than the one I spec'd. But because I dragged myself down there, I had time. For the next hour I sat with the lighting tech and documented all the changes he would need to make in the next few days for the show to run as I designed it. Had I neglected my job and not gone in that night, things would've never been right and the show would've looked mediocre.
Last month, at the start of a load in, I had a truck missing. When we finally got the driver on the phone, she informed us that she was sitting outside the venue and couldn't back up her rig due to the cars parked in the way. Forty people now waited one hour because one person was late. Had she shown up at the gig an hour before call time there would have been plenty of room to jockey into position. We were screwed, just because one person didn't realize that arriving right on time…is late.
