2% Club

My mom just sent me this survey, where the last thing you are supposed to think of is a red hammer. Apparently 98% of people think of a red hammer at the end of this survey, but 2% of people think of different things. My mom and I are part of the 2% Club. She thought of an orange wrench, because she had been plumbing all day. I thought of a yellow wrench because I had been working in the theatre all day. I know you want to hear about it, so on we go.

It was a pretty easy day at the Eisenhower Auditorium. Or rather, it would have been easy if we had done things correctly. I have reached a point in my working where the big bosses are trusting me with more and more tasks. I know my way around, which keys unlock which locks, where all the lights hang, and how to reach the charts. Unfortunately, that means I am being trusted with unsupervised tasks.

I was put in charge of cabling the second electric, which basically means I had to go along and plug the lights in. Having never been in charge before, I went along and did the job I always do, not realizing there were two other jobs that need to be done at the same time. Along comes Gary, just as mad as can be that all the lights are plugged in, but nothing is labeled. To be fair, I had begun labeling the wires, but the job was taking longer because I hadn't labeled as I went. After he broke all the connection, he made us start the wiring all over again and label as we went. There's twenty minutes wasted right there. Unfortunately, Gary hadn't paid attention to the configuration of things, and we ended up with an extra plug on one end and no plug on the other end. He remedied this by bringing in a whole separate cable for the lonely unplugged light.

Margo has never been in charge of stacking the x-ray lights on their cart, but she was put in charge of it this time. Is Gary just getting lazy? She and I watched Susan stack the other cart, and we followed whatever they were doing. Unfortunately, one of the lights near the bottom was so slightly off-center that by the time we reached the top of the stack (about 5 lights up), the lights were toppling at a rapid rate. Susan didn't want to unstack everything and start over, so we put the safety cable on and let them be. Big mistake for putting them back up the next day. Susan took off the safety cable, and just about crushed herself underneath a stack of lights. We had to unstack the whole thing right there while she held them up instead of doing things the easy way.

After last week's fiasco of taking the chairs off and lining them up in the wrong order, a 45-minute fiasco, I'm surprised Susan and Gary trust us with anything. They never learn.