Blowing off Steam

I don't have anything new to report, but I haven't posted in a while and I really need to vent a little bit.

Let's start with last night. I was working the audio booth for both shows yesterday, something that I enjoy more than anything. Because ABC was showing Harry Potter we were going to have two headline segments before the ten. Headlines are live cutins where we only tell you what will be in the show when it starts, like a live commercial. One was to be :15 sec at 9:47 the other would be :30 sec at 9:57. I had all the mic checks and everything set to go by 9:45, the first headline went without a hitch. Then I sat there and didn't touch anything until it was about time for the second. I got a nagging feeling about a minute from the second headline to do some quick mic checks again. So I did, and there was no audio. The cutin was coming and I had NO IDEA what was wrong. Unfortunately the entire 30 secs was spent with picture but no sound. I was trying to fix it but to no avail. And the Director just repeatedly screaming at me across headset to get the audio up was not helping AT ALL! Turns out the board had decided to arbitrarily activate the broken automated faders, which were down. And since they were down none of the audio would sound, regardless of where those faders were set. Of course everyone who knows nothing about audio suddenly has a couple cents to put in. And my explanation of what happened was not good enough to pass through the director's scrutiny. He held me late trying to get a better explanation, but the thing is I just don't know how it could have happened. It's a gremlin in the board. I didn't touch anything in between cutins.

Earlier this week, on Thursday I was out on the floor for the duration of the night. Our "crack" promo producer decided that he was going to change his promo around and not tell us about it. As production we look and see video-camera shot-video, and after he changed it it still went video-camera shot-video. But he had moved the camera shot further up in the script. So after two takes, of us looking at Katie reading from her script while on camera I was asked to tell her to read off the prompter, the explanation to give her was that the script had been changed. So she read through it real fast and pointed out that no, it was all the same script she had in her hand and she liked to read from her paper script if possible because she could read faster that way. So we tried again and again took her reading from paper on camera. Now she was getting ticked off at me. So I had the director yelling at me, Katie yelling at me, and I didn't know what to tell anyone because I had relayed everything that had been told to me! Then I heard the producer come across the directors microphone asking, "What's going on out there?" And he said it with a hint of annoyance in his voice. This was it. That straw broke this camel's back. I shot back across my microphone with, "What's going on in there?" That set everyone off... But we finally got the information that had not been told to us. And one take later we recorded the promo that was used on the air. Funny how things just work when all the information has been given. The annoying thing is that this promo-producer even works here, he unbelievably has no clue what he is doing, and he is getting a nicer paycheck than I am. Piece of crap.