I Let Him Down

Today was my chance to prove to my boss that I was capable of handling things while he was away - the only problem was I wasn't as prepared as I thought.

This would be the first time my boss left for an extended period of time. His big phrase before he left was "It's very important to me that Sunday goes well," 'Sunday' being the week's biggest day of my week-to-week, church day.

As a Technical Director, or TD as it is commonly nicknamed, when you work for a church you have several jobs, but one major responsibility that trumps all others: have things ready and working for Sunday morning. Typically, when you work for a large church like I do, there's a lot more moving pieces than your normal room with pews. Almost every single church I've worked at, with the exception of one, has invested millions of dollars into their sound system, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, into their lighting and video setups. When I tell people this, typically the initial reaction is "Why would a church spend so much money on a sound system? Aren't they supposed to be spending money on feeding the homeless and going on missions trips?"

To some degree, this is true. I've seen some churches invest in things that don't really make a lot of sense to me, either: like a church in Colorado Springs that built a stage that rotates and can mysteriously raise the singer to the stage on a platform that comes from underground while the smoke machines distract the audience. So much for putting all the focus on the big guy upstairs, right? Well, spending lots of money on a good sound system doesn't seem very bizarre to me, considering that every single church has a preacher (who uses a microphone of some sort) and a live band (which uses several microphones and instruments).

I digress. I spent time during the week making sure everything was ready and working...or so I thought. The band arrived and I was ready to have a smooth soundcheck.
"I can't hear my guitar."
I heard these words come out of the worship leader's mouth and instantly knew that this day was not going to go as I had planned. See, the problem with him not being able to hear his guitar was very bad, because everyone in the band have devices called Avioms that allow them to control exactly what they hear in their ears while they play. It's a great system that takes a lot of pressure off of the audio engineer and it quickly shuts up your diva musicians who are constantly never satisfied with their mix...that is, until they don't work. When the Avioms don't work, everyone is pissed.

I need to backtrack.

A few weeks ago, our digital console got fried by lighting. Our insurance company is about as fast as responding to any claims we make just about as fast as it's taking the American dollar to become absolutely worthless since its creation, so we won't be getting our console fixed any time soon. More on that in another story. In other words, we switched from this:

To this:

Now, this might look like an upgrade, but believe me - this is a serious downgrade (and yes, I do know what all of those knobs and buttons do).

...and we're back...

Now that this has been established, different consoles use different gear to make these Avioms work. We had to spend about $1000 to get our Avioms working again, and they worked just fine last week. Even though I didn't change anything with our Aviom setup throughout last week, something changed and they were not working.

Without getting too technical, we started soundcheck about 30-40 minutes late and had to continue troubleshooting these issues during while soundcheck was going.

Luckily, we were able to nail down these problems before doors opened, so the congregation didn't see any of my stupidity shine through...well, at least not this time.

Integrity

This is the part that sucked. I knew I could have probably gotten away with some of the things that happened and only told my boss, Billy, about the major issues we had. It would make me look a little bit better, but that's not the point. I've been a strong believer over the years that it's best to just come out and tell someone what went wrong even if you don't think they would ever find out. So, I sent him an email and gave him a phone call.

It was a tough phone call - I knew I wouldn't get fired or anything; I knew my job was not on the line because of this, but the underlying principle is that I have a lot of respect for my boss, UNLIKE my first boss. I think some people aren't even that unfortunate. Maybe I'll start a story series on that, but for now, just know that my first boss was the worst boss I will ever have. I can say that confidently. I had plans to make my boss happy - I wanted him to come back from vacation without there being issues and have minimal to zero conflict while he was away. He told me what I already knew, but I'm glad he was up front with me and said it. I just need to be more diligent about checking everything before people arrive. Some of the issues were simply because as I was working on things this week, I gathered enough evidence to assume certain things would work which was foolish of me.

The last thing I wanted was to let my boss down, but we all make careless mistakes sometimes. But what I learned today was that I can always be more prepared. It sounds like a simple lesson - that's because it is. It's a lesson I learned a long time ago, but sometimes you just have to re-learn the basics. Not only is it good discipline, it's refreshing - even if you have to learn those lessons the hard way.