Tiny Moments of Stupidity and Woe

When people don't properly perform the tasks assigned to them and it ends up becoming my problem.

Here is a perfect example: In church today, the youth minister comes into the sound booth and hands me a DVD. He tells me that it contains a short movie that the priest wants to play at the beginning of his sermon. OK, no big deal. I pop it into the DVD player, let the main menu load, and everything is good to go. When it comes time to play the DVD, there's no sound. So I check everything on the channel strip: Cables in? Check. Gain up? Check. Pad on? No. Stereo routing button down? Check. Channel on? Yep. Slider at unity, good to go. But there's still no sound. Everyone is looking up into the sound booth, waiting for me to do something, but there's nothing I can do, except feel extremely embarrassed.

It was only after I loaded the DVD into the room's computer that I learned the DVD literally had no audio. Ugh! Things like this happen often and it always ends up looking like it's my fault because I'm the one standing in front of the console.

The worst is when somebody does something like this, and blames it on you.

"I can't hear my vocals, are you sure you turned this thing on??? We're in a hurry here!"
"What channel are you plugged into"?
"I dunno like 11 or 12 or something."
"Your microphone channel is number 14"
"Oh, sorry."

"I can't hear my monitor, did you it turn it up??"
"Is it plugged in?"
"Oops, sorry."



Jam it back in, in the dark.