OOC # 39
In reply to Admiral Hack (msg # 129):
Well, the park is open on weekends, right now. We open one show Memorial Day weekend, and another show the weekend after that. Right now is the annual insane push to get all the massive projects done before rehearsals start (we never get them ALL done...)
I pulled the rip cord this morning. Got there and Macyn (the other tech guy I'm working with...I should start calling him my partner in crime or something) told me that after yesterday's phone calls where he talked with the director about needing different jumpers for the LED neon, to hook it up to the controller they had, the director suggested just cutting the default controller box off the set we had and wiring it directly to the DMX controller. And at that point, I was like, "Ummmm...we were already in the deep end of the pool, and you just tossed me into the ocean on this one. There are four wires...which may or may not match colors. If they do, it's simple...if they don't, I'm going by dead-reckoning as to which colors should be spliced together, and I am NOT comfortable with that. I don't know if hooking the wires up wrong is going to fry the whole thing, or screw up one color so we only get 66% usefulness out of it..." So they called the park electricians to come look at what needed to be done, and since Macyn's been in communication with the director for a few weeks about it now, they had him take over as point man for the neon, which freed me up to paint the off-stage walls that have also been on the overdue list for a month, now.
In the same phone call where the director offered to have Macyn head up the neon, he asked if there was anything he could do better to help facilitate things, and I mentioned that it would have been nice to have had ANY sort of information about the neon (beyond the fact that we were installing something he was calling 'neon' but wasn't really) back in January or February, because I could have studied up on it a little bit and gotten myself mentally prepared for everything we had to do, instead of getting one day's notice and a couple of PDFs (they call them 'tear sheets'...basically, the kind of information pamphlet you'd hand out at a lighting designers' convention, with practically no useful information with regards to how to install it, what kind of power allocations have to be made for it, etc...so, a couple of short steps above completely useless for what I need to do...although I didn't go into all that detail about it). He apologized...it was still in the "we'll do this if the park says yes to it" phase, but he agreed that he could have sent information about "this is something we're looking at using" instead of just leaving it hanging in Limbo. So, we'll see.
But, hey, the offstage walls are painted (except for around one doorway...I was using a paint sprayer, the doors to the backstage area are being replaced, so those doorways were wide open. I stapled plastic up around one, but I couldn't do the other without basically sealing off backstage and I'm not sadistic enough to do that). Ten minutes with a paint roller tomorrow, and it's done. We're theoretically painting the stage floor tomorrow, as well, because this weekend is the last time that there will be nobody on the stage for a couple of days until November. If it doesn't happen now, it's not happening this year... (the floors offstage need to be painted, regardless...we had some renovations done and there are sections of the floor that are just bare plywood, at the moment, so SOME painting is gonna have to happen.)
Also found out that one of the illusions that they're planning to use this year might need a major overhaul...it uses hydraulics to elevate part of the illusion, and the hydraulic motors are running really erratically (until they blow their fuses, that is...usually when the part of the illusion is going up and about a foot to 18 inches higher than its default setting...and then it's stuck there until we replace the fuses...) The electricians came and checked out the controller box for it and couldn't find anything, but they found out that the motors are drawing WAY more power than they should be. Had some of the maintenance guys who work on hydraulics come down...and they're not positive just yet, but they think there's a very good chance that the motors are failing and that's what's causing the overloads and the erratic operation. The director just bought this illusion a few months ago (the magician who owned it before passed away), so he doesn't really know the service history of it, how well it was maintained, how well it was stored, etc (considering Macyn spent a couple of days scrubbing crystallized cat pee out of the inside of another illusion from the same magician, storage and maintenance were not high priorities...)
So, yeah...it's gonna be an interesting spring...