Pressure
Right now I’m gearing up to go to Gatlinburg for the next four days. In those four days I’ll be taking care of all of the audio/video needs for the company I work for during their huge yearly conference.
Did I mention I did this with another guy last year but this year it’s all on my shoulders? Yeah, no pressure there.
Now, when I say ‘huge’ it may seem paltry to some: We’re talking about 175 customers, dozens of employees from the company and special guest speakers. We hold sessions in various rooms and those rooms must be outfitted with a digital projector, computer, speakers if need be and there are more computers and more projectors that must be setup in the lounge area for in-between session downtime and breakfast/lunch.
Then there’s the audio system. I have a brand new Lavalier mic (that’s a handless, wireless lapel mic to me and you) and two handhelds. Last year we had the conference in San Antonio and it was great—I had another guy from the office guiding me through my first conference and a huge hotel staff helping me and the audio mixing board was a massive 16 channels.
What do I have this year? Two XLR (mic) ports in the wall and a volume nob. That’s it. No mixing board, no support for more than two devices from anywhere. Hotel support? Two guys. That’s all.
With that said it was my turn to then find adapters for both a computer and a VCR that would work in a mic (XLR) jack. This meant a trip to Guitar Center in Knoxville a few times to find the mini to RCA to guitar to XLR converters (yeah, I know, it’s ridiculous) and last Friday I was supposed to test all of this equipment.
Last Friday I got lost as hell (also the reason for no post). I took the wrong backroad to Gatlinburg, TN, because traffic on the main roads is somewhere between hell and purgatory. By the time it was over I ended up in Cosby, TN.
You know where Cosby is? You hit nowhere and take a left. There’s Cosby. But alas, I saw a sign that said Gatlinburg Turn Right and so I did. Little did I know that through my backroad adventures for two hours I had ended up thirty miles past Gatlinburg and had to backtrack my way up there.
Before it was over I got to do one thing (test their wireless connectivity) before I was out of time. As opposed to the laundry list of Audio/Video tests I was planning on accomplishing. Now I feel nothing but stress and pressure. And thanks to me getting lost it made me not finish certain things in the office on Friday, needless to say some were not happy about that, least of all myself.
So I’ve been beating myself up for not only slacking in this area but also running around trying to finish the final schedule of Things I Have To Do on a timeline and so on and so forth.
If there’s a diety, his/her help would be appreciated. There will be light blogging this week, so expect late posts if I get to them. They’ll all probably lament the same things this post is: Stressed, freaking out, stressed, freaking out. I alternate at this point.
May your troubles be much less than mine, okay?
2 Comments:
Cosby, eh? Congratulations, you inadvertenly visited my birthplace.
Sounds like the usual "special event" kind of thing, but try to keep it in perspective. I sit here contemplating the fact that a couple of my friends from high school are right now somewhere over the Atlantic, flying home from Eastern Europe to see their son for the last time and give the doctors permission to turn off life support.
Yes, life sucks right now for you, but it is always worse somewhere else. If you keep that in mind, it makes the little things (like the ineveitable hardware/software failures you will probably endure this week) seem as small as they really are in the scheme of things.
And look at Unisys--smoking servers at Linuxworld. Even the big boys have bad days.....
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