NOTE: this is a post I wrote on my Treo at the conference in Amsterdam but did not get a chance to post, as my Google came up in Dutch. Here it is in all its glory, several days late, but no dollars short...
I'm finally tired. It figures the jet lag would wait until the conference started to strike. I went to bed last night at 10:30 PM, tired but a little giddy about my role as producer-director-AV guy. People ask for my opinion! Sometimes they disagree with me! I actually like it when everyone pours in all of their divergent opinions into the big bucket of a Project. It's convergence via Darwinian meme selection.
Granted, it's plenty easy to praise democracy when you get the most votes. When it came time to decide on two speakers or four in the small-ish starting room, Frank, the quite competent head of the team setting my client up clearly disagreed with my opinion that it was better to have and not need four than need and not have. He had a point. The speakers aren't pretty and the room is too small to hide them behind, say, a plant. Still, he did his best to make my bad orders good. I get nervous when equipment ordered doesn't show up and I figure if the client feels the same, we might all be in trouble. So I played it safe and ugly.
Speaking of ugly, the weather here is apparently abnormally bad. Where? Amsterdam! It's been windy and autumn-y at least since I landed and, although you don't normally see much of a place during conferences like this one, it's been kind of sad to look out the window and see gray.
The little things are cheering, though. Breakfast this morning was elaborate and over too quickly. I've only myself to blame for making it abundantly clear to the client that I would be keeping buffet hours... 7:00 - 8:30, right up to the start of the show. Technical director Alex covered for me while I ran for lox, a roll, a mini Brie round (3 oz), apple and caramel Nutella. The breakfast Brie was as good as the lunch Brie was bad; apparently, one is French and the other Dutch. I can see why, since it tastes like it came out of a swamp. At any rate, I'm saving the apple and precious, precious Nutella for later. Nothing like hoarding in Europe, where everything is novelty-sized. Cars, food, Diet Coke (Coca-Cola Light), rooms. My king-sized bed is two twins pushed together, with separate covers for each. Perhaps that's how they save marriages on the Continent; a Berlin wall for the unconscious. I can't say that I would have slept better with the full bed to stretch out on, but it would have been a perk.
Funny enough, I woke up last night twenty minutes after 1:00 and fifteen minutes after my phone alarm was supposed to wake me, which it did not because it was set to 1:00 PM. Duh. This worried me, so I struggled to wake all the way up because I wanted to make certain I had a wakeup call set for five AM, to give myself time to finish up presentation formatting, run, wash my socks, shower and arrive in time for my self-set seven AM call.
You heard right: wash my socks. In the process of shedding weight by repacking my bag, I managed to repack my socks into my closet. I'm committing many fashion faux pas by wearing white socks with business casual attire. Times like now, Del Close's words haunt me. Channeling a director who had criticized him after a similar misstep, he said, "Close, all I could see were your ankles twinkling in the stagelights." Twankles? Not his term. My feet are wet now. I washed my socks this morning thinking a couple hours were all I needed to dry heavy cotton. No. Even fifteen minutes' hard ironing would not dry those suckers, and by go time it was catch-as-catch-can. At this rate, I should be comfortable by this afternoon, though I'm intrigued by this thing the natives call "shopping".
Probably not. There are always a million details for these events and getting away for anything is a chore. I remember doing a gig in Birmingham, Alabama in a four star hotel next to a mall. I got away from the ballroom twice, for a combined total of twenty minutes, enough to get panoramic photos of the Merry-Go-Round I would never have the chance to ride.
Boo-hoo. I'm in Amsterdam.
We joked yesterday about how little I actually do and yet I still collect a paycheck. Oh, the airplane ride was no vacation, not for me. though, technically that wasn't true for everyone on my particular 747, unless they recently added cowboy hats and t-shirts to Dutch business casual. Boy, those kids were loud. My most important job right now is to press a button when the MicroCue goes off, and it has both lights and sounds, so I'd half to be twice the village idiot to miss it. Every event I expect to be replaced by a trained chicken. Of course, the real trick is knowing when not to hit the button. I have nine presentations in the cue for today. In theory, I could allow any of my ten presenters to advance slides to the end, "End of show" black screen, then simply load up the presentation while everyone watched, but this would look uncool, too much like sitting at the computer. If, though, I can load and switch presentations seamlessly, it's a magic trick for which people will pay quite handsomely. The switch to do this is also trained chicken simple. It's one button. So eat more chicken, because one trained roster cannot do my job but two might, so the only chance we should give them to gather is at the wrong end of a Chicken McNugget.
I am also responsible for proper room setup, general client satisfaction, and redesigning presentations to follow a shifting template even as I incorporate changed and eliminated slides and propagating this among two computers while maintaining th aforementioned "magic". But this is not as entertaining as saying my job is threatened by poultry, so I don't include it in my verbal resume. That's what keeps me up at night.
That and what Michael Bay's done to Transformers. I want it to be great, but will I be amazed at the end or merely numb like I was by the time Bruce Willis detonated himself at the end of "Armageddon"?
I had a scare one presentation when my speaker suggested I break out of the slide show to play a six-second MPEG-4. Magic, people! I instead suggested I embed it in the presentation although I would not have a chance to test it on screen. He agreed, with the understanding that I could always kill the magic if he needed it that badly. I tested it on both computers. Offline, it worked fine. When it came time to show on the big screen, however, my computer crapped out and showed only a big black box where the movie would have been. I loaded the slide on backup and switched quickly. By some miracle of computation, it not only played in the dinky square I'd embedded it in, it played full screen. The switching error almost looked right, and Magic would be conserved.
Here is my second scary moment: in the main presenter's show, the screen started cutting to black. A list of gremlins ran through my mind, cavorting, I think. The graphics card might have crapped out. The connection between graphics card and motherboard had loosened on one of my users' laptops at the University, something I realized after a modicum of Googling and an unbelievable amount of screw removal. I simply did not have the time to deal with that much screwball behavior. The VGA cable might have come loose, in which case a speedy jiggle would fix it. I looked down. The screen flickered, utterly without my permission. I looked at the graphics switcher - to the AV company, it's an Extron DVS 406, but to me it's a big black box with LEDs, one button I must press and many more I must not. My theory, eventually and with a good deal of angst as the screen went black and my paranoid ears picked up a startled murmur, was that the switcher had gone into a kind of power saver mode and gone down and back up quickly. It happened a few more times before it normalized. I still can't be sure what it was, but at least I have the satisfaction of also stumping the AV guys.
The final bits of Day One were brutal, as many details needed answering and the conference ran more than an hour late. I could not stop thinking about sleeping. The room was too public and the work too urgent to do so, but I do see how close that much tired is to being drunk.
