Ugh... I recently dropped the tech class out of my tech schedule so that I could find a real job, and somehow got called in a week or so before the show was going into
preview. The LD handed me a
plot with about 80 dots on it, which represented instruments. I had never seen the script before, and when I said, "Do you want a
fresnel here, or a S4?" he said, "oh... you decide." Then I had to cut twenty lights because we didn't have enough circuits.
When he asked me at the very last minute if we could set up
ground cycs up against the wood set and I told him that not only would it be a fire hazard, but the kitchen set would be in the way, he went and asked an older tech I had brought with me, who also told him no. When he asked me how a
cue looked during
wet tech and I said terrible, he would say, "oh what do you know?"
After he left, just as rehearsal started, I would stay everyday and focus as I needed to after getting permission from the director. One day, the
stage manager came to me and said, "when will you guys be done with lights?" and I replied, "Oh, I don't know, given that our Carpenter works 7 hours in the day and we can't focus, you guys start rehearsing at 2, and our LD won't come in for night calls (if he can't work well at night, nobody can), I would say, about 2 weeks into the show." She was clearly upset and I further explained that I have been pleading for night calls with him. The Director overheard, called the
Producer who called the LD who came in the next day and called us names and yelled and crap, he at one
point said, "Nobody else needs to know what's going on because I'm the boss, I'm in charge." By the way, he's also our TD.
I got my mom to come in and supervise us at night, because there has to be an adult present with all of us underage hooligans. Our LD never showed to a night
call. But he was pissed for some reason that we were getting work done at night...
When I asked him for a
wet tech the next day, with the actors present, he said "No. We'll
cue the rest of the lights tomorrow and if we need to we'll have extra techs stand in for actors. We're just going to do a
dry tech." I tried to explain to him that it doesn't work that way. Basically what happened was the SM and I went to the Director and the actors to get a
wet tech the next day. At that
point we were three days away from
preview. We got a
wet tech and things went fine after that, except the lights looked like crap. It made me cringe, it made the older lighting techs who have already graduated cringe, it made our Fall LD cringe, it even made our
Producer cringe.
A couple days later, the LD/TD monster thing told me that if I wouldn't have come in to do lights, he would have PAID my boyfriend to do it! I almost killed him... again. And I never got paid for it either.
Dry techs are dumb, especially when you're what, three days away from
preview and you haven't even had a run through?
Cue to Cue's are also somewhat of a pain if you're doing lights because there could be stuff in between where you're like, "Well that's not enough light" or "that looks a little funky." And then you have to deal with crying
Stage Managers and people who don't know how to do their job. Oh, how I wish I could sit around for six hours reading a
book and getting paid. How I wish I could've gotten paid for that particular job even. That's 100+ hours of my life I won't get back, or have beaten several videogames with. But I guess we can't all have what we want... Pleh...
That's kind of the moral of my story... When you feel like your job sucks, think of my story and you'll be like, no SUNSHINE DANCE TIME!!! At least, I hope so. Sorry for the long rant.
I can't wait to work with professionals... And there's a sleepy kitty on my lap so I must away.