I'd guess the
auditorium was state of the art for a lot longer than most of the computer systems you deal with.
That's hard for me to say, since I'm new to theater and theater tech. The school was built in 2003. Here in Loudoun county, we
build schools according to a fixed architectural design. With a few options, that means our middle schools all look exactly alike (or are mirror images of each other). That's a shame because it creates the expectation in the minds of parents that, if one school has a given asset, then
all schools will have that asset. The school
system calls that "parity," but I
call it "expensive." For theatrical purposes, more than one school could share a theater. But, to be cost effective, that theater would have to be in a school, not a stand-alone structure. And you are never going to sell Loudoun county parents on the idea that someone
else's kid goes to a school with a theater, but
their kid doesn't. So, they
all have theaters that
no one uses. What makes it even worse is that it is typical for a school to open with hundreds of empty seats, then have its population grow to the
point where it is overcrowded by hundreds of students. When that happens, where do they hold class for the excess kids? The
auditorium! They close the partitions that turn it into three rooms and, when they do this, the teachers always turn on the
house incandescents (instead of the ceiling fluorescents), because they like the
color temperature better. Alas, those bulbs burn out fast and are hard to get replaced. More importantly, it means the "theater" is usually in use as a classroom, so the idea of adding dramatic arts to the school's curriculum is ruled out.
Interestingly, after I did "Alladin Jr" with the last year, and discovered that the teachers who taught class in the
auditorium simply refused to use the fluorescents (and keep the incadescents dark), I subsequently did lights for the "drama camp" held in that school last summer. To turn
switch between incandescents and fluorescents, you have to manipulate a wall
switch that controls both
en masse (the incandescents are actually in nine sets, each with its own
dimmer). Well, guess what? The support company that maintains the theater gear for the school
system had updated the firmware in the
DMX controllers they use, and it was
no longer possible to turn on the incandescents from the wall
switch. It could only be done from a little touch-panel
LCD display in the wings. Of course, no one told me this, so I was sure I had broken something for a few days, until it hit me ("aha!") that
this was a really good idea. It stopped the teachers from using up the
house incandescents, left them control over the fluorescents, and still let someone who knew how to do it (or, like me, cracked the code) control those incandescents via the
DMX console. I'm sure the teachers who teach in there hate it, and some may even blame me for it (as they may have heard me grumbling about this during "Alladin Jr," but, heck, my son doesn't go there anymore and my director loves it, so I'm calling that win.
Interesting that you compared this to my computer background, Bill. When I was in college, my school did not teach computers (I went to a liberal arts college where, apparently, the thinking was that if anyone would pay you to do a thing, then they did not teach that thing at that college). So, we had one, but it was mostly for limited use by math and physics students, largely under their own self-direction. The machine was an IBM-1130, which was obsolete five years before I got there. What this meant was that it was very simple machine that hardly anyone used. Except me. I got the key to the computer room and was allowed to stay up all night with the thing if I wanted to. I learned a ton of stuff that way, and that's partly because the old machine was fairly easy for me to understand. If I'd started out with something more complicated like a VAX-11/780 (which we got during my senior year), I bet would never have learned as much.
Getting this chance to help out in the middle school is a lot like that. Yes, our dimmers-nothing-but-dimmers space is definitely no longer state-of-the-art. And that old Innovator 48/96 with its 3.5-inch diskette and text-only display has more gray hair than I do. But it's a great place for me to be starting out and trying to catch up with
current technology. Administrative overhead makes it hard to get some things done, but at least I'm not competing with anyone else for the chance to be involved in productions there. So, much like my days with the IBM-1130, I'm learning as much as I am partly because it's all simpler than a state-of-the-art theater would be today.
I'll take that trade any day.