dalesql

ten hours of sunday overtime. good.
It was a lovely sunny day, not to hot or humid, not too cold, and we were taking down a lighting rig in a humongous tent. (about 150 foot by 300 or so feet. Peak of the tent was 40 feet up, so we needed a boom lift to take down the lighting rig hung up there. ) So that was good too.

Not so good, boom lift got stuck in a soft spot in the grass when one of our guys decided to try driving it without the big sheets of structual plastic we were supposed to use on the grass. So did the other boom lift. Oops. fortunately there was a telescoping boom forklift on site that could lift up the boom lifts out of the mud.   wasted an hour or three futzing around with them.   But, I'm being paid by the hour, and sundays are overtime. So not so bad.

Driving a 40 foot box truck on memorial drive in cambridge. Kind of nervous-making. even though our trucking manager said that there was some kind of permit on file for this specific route with the truck.

Then one of the sound guys was plugging in the power for the chain motors that were holding up the speaker clusters and had it pretty much explode in his hand. 150 amps in a dead short to ground made a big arc flash and evil buzzy sound that gained my immediate attention from about 200 feet away on a bright sunny day.   I don't think he got hit by the electricity, but the arc flash of the metal vaporizing took a couple of chunks of meat out of his hand and finger, and left both of his hands and arms covered with soot. Cleaned it up, put some burn goop on and bandaged it. he drove himself to the ER from there.

now we have no power to our motor controller, and we still had rigging in the air.   So took the burned up connectors off the cable ends and bodged them together with a lot of electrical tape covering everything. It worked, and got the rest of the motors on the ground and packed. The blown up parts were from another company, so it is a bit of relief to me that it wasn't one of our bits of gear that did this. seeing as I'm the guy responsible for keeping it all in good repair. But, I think I'm gonna go pull out motor power connectors and adapters on monday and do some preventive maintenance on them.

After this, the rest of the day was fairly ordinary. except lunch was ten minutes of nomming a powerbar and a can of mackerel from the bottom of my gig bag instead of a proper lunch break. Crew boss thought around 1230 that we would be done in an hour.   Take stuff down, pack it up. Load everything onto the truck and navigate a 40 foot box truck that was, I think, overloaded, through busy Boston sunday afternoon traffic back to the shop. Left the site about 3:25 pm. Nice long hour after non-lunch that.   not quite an hour later, back at the shop, park and put the key away, write up my timesheet and drink a lot of cold water and finally able to hit the local Chinese restaurant for some egg rolls and soup for my long delayed lunch.

Home now, showered and relaxed, getting ready for bed.