About 6 months ago a friend of mine sent me an email. Said he was doing me a favor and had signed me up on an open forum where old touring road dogs could find each other. It was fairly new and went by the moniker Crewspace.com
For years there have been a few sites dedicated to stage craft and the people who work in our biz. I remember Roaddogz and a few similar ones. I don’t know if they are still there anymore. I think I lasted about 3 minutes on those sites and never returned. I did like the Light Network. One could actually get answers to technical questions on that forum. I still go there once in a while and find it amusing and helpful. In fact I’ve probably emailed over 100 Vectorworks model/symbols to people requesting them on that site in the last 10 years.
The Grand MA forum is useful. When I have problems with that console I go there and can usually find an answer. Since that company doesn’t make their own fixture profiles for you, I go there when I can’t find one or somebody else to make it. When I had troubles with palettes deleting themselves on that console last year nobody in Germany could figure out why I was having an issue. Then a few suggestions came in from fellow users of this console and we figured out the problem. The hog forum is good that way as well. Hopefully the new PLSN Forum will be like that, but have different departments for lights, projection etc.
Ah but back to crew space. In the last few months I have been emailed from this site about every other day. That’s because every time a new person logs in, they can scroll thru the list of folks and see old friends they used to tour with. And reconnect. Or if you just list one of these other folks as a friend, crewspace send you an email saying that so and so lists you as a friend.
This is great. Or is it? I sometimes receive close to 100 emails in a day when I have a lot of projects going on. And don’t reply to comments. That makes me look like a goon. I want to say hi to Thumper in Atlanta and Hal in Tahoe, but I’m swamped at the moment. So I’m thinking these guys may think I have too big a head and don’t have time for them. It’s not like that. And I do want to hear from them. Just maybe not that day. Unfortunately I forget to reply and I rarely surf thru old mail so I may appear to not care.
Back to crew space again. This site looks like it has no valuable info, like job listings or other cool stuff. I think it’s more like the back lounge in a tour bus. People can feel free to slag anyone they want. Including me, I like a good slag. In fact some guy wrote into PLSN slagging me in a letter to the editor recently. I insisted they print it because this is America and we have freedom of speech here. The guy slagging me was way, way off base and had never met me before. But I slagged salesman in a recent article. And he’s a salesman I’m told. So he has the right to dish some crap back at me. It’s all good. I received about 50 emails from readers/friends who know me to say that this guy was totally off the mark. But I knew that. Even jerks are entitled to opinions, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing on this blog here.
Hey but crew space is good for some other things as well. I can find guys who may be looking for some road work. Board ops, Lighting techs. Truck drivers. I think most of these guys here are freelance these days anyway. And when all of a sudden I need someone, I can now look there and see if I can find a familiar face to go do some gigs.
So I’m gonna give this site some time and see where it goes. I bet there will be over 1000 members sometime this year. And you can count me as one.
