Last Night my high school had it's annual Broadway Night production (an end of the year show where we perform different numbers from shows and do skits and what not) and in addition to performing, I had the pleasure of throwing together a last minute lighting design. The entire cast stayed after school until the show to do a run through. I put some pretty simple stuff together in about an hour and during the rehearsal I was going over how I programmed the board with the kid who was running it. I went to slide up a few channels and when I did the lights on stage flickered and dropped out completely, leaving the stage in a blackout. I restarted the board and everything started to work fine, so I tried to see what exactly caused the issue. I messed around with a couple of channel sliders and found out that it only occurred when I faded them up quickly. So, I told my board op. to make sure he faded everything slowly and fortunately everything worked fine throughout the show. My high school uses a Lehigh Millennium, and it's already had a few problems. When I was in my first show in 9th grade a few years back, our in-school show got delayed because in the middle of the performance the DMX cable somehow died and they couldn't control the lighting. My school was only built in 2004 so the equipment is relatively "new," but the board hasn't been serviced or checked out at all during that time. I think a lot of the problems stem from the fact that our music department has poorly trained students run the board for concerts, and none of them can be bothered to shut down the board correctly. I don't really have that much leverage when it comes to anything like this, but I was wondering for my own sake, what could have caused the entire system to blackout?