stupidist mistakes

ship said:
For me, I have a Fluke AC-1 voltage sniffer that travels with me when ever I get up from my work table. Now if only it's range could be expanded so that it can sense voltage from my shirt it's clipped to as opposed to having to actually un-clip it and put it next to the wire.

Got myself one of those too that hangs out in my backpack that I take everywhere. It goes on the airplane almost every week. This week the TSA dude at the airport decided he was going to have to learn more about the thing and pulled me over to secondary. Had to have him plug something in, hold it up, red, unplug, no red light to satisfy him. He was throughly amazed by the thing and let me go after five minutes of extra hassle. Didn't really matter in the end, that flight left a good three hours late on Friday.
 
Guy I know did a show with pyro and forgot to change his shoes before attempting to board a plane. He got more than pulled asside in a "spread up" type of way.
 
ship said:
Guy I know did a show with pyro and forgot to change his shoes before attempting to board a plane. He got more than pulled asside in a "spread up" type of way.

Heh. Oops. I started going through the new vestibule looking security device that the TSA people call the "puffer". It blasts some compressed air at you and then you stand there for 15 seconds and it does something or another to make sure you don't have any explosives residues or something and then it releases you. Nobody wants to go through it so it just saves time and hassle at the TSA checkpoint. Don't have to take my shoes off either. Some airports seem to have it and others don't. Dunno if they're testing it or what, but it's nicer than the legacy metal detector, no shoes, hats, coats, etc route.
 
Well, luckily, this was not my mistake, but during my last show, someone decided to climb around above the ceiling tiles. Well, as an intelligent idea as I'm sure it was, it failed. So the guy slips, catches himself on a single cable (his "safety harness"), breaks through the ceiling tiles and is left there, hanging thirty feet above the floor. Luckily, we managed to get him down, but wow. I was in the house at the time, so seeing a huge explosion of ceiling tiles then some guy hanging there with a dumbfounded expression on his face, wow. That is a form of stupidity so great that it's almost artistic. What a fun day that was.
 
I'm sure your school's administration was thrilled to hear about the next day too.
 
Didn't happen to me but...
About 10 years ago (roughly) at my high school, one kid fell 30+ feet through the house ceiling, landing perfectly in a chair.
Our auditorium has a crawl space between the roof and ceiling where we run our electrical wires from booth to stage. The doors are never locked, so we techs try to keep an eye on the doors while running shows.
Well, apparantly a student was goofing around up there, fell off the 2x4's that serve as a catwalk, straight through the acoustic tiles in the ceiling, and landed upright in one of the auditorium seats.
He broke both legs, or so the story goes. We tell this story to every incoming techie, so that they know not to go up there.
 
I'll never forget the time I got electrocuted on the truss about 8 feet high by a strand of Christmas lights. I really didn't think it was Christmas lights because it was enough to make me just hop off the truss. I was about 12 at the time. Thats the most shocking experience I've had, and the biggest accidental fall. Christmas lights pack more of a punch than I thought they could. Fuses or breakers didn't trip or blow, thats what I find odd. Another thing I am remembering is the time I though I could jump out of the front of the sound booth, and I did not decide if I was going to try to land on the bleecher seat or on the concrete (carpeted but still hard) floor. I landed with my feet half on the bleecher so I fell onto the floor, my legs went out, my butt slammed on the bleecher, and continued to the floor and my head whip-lashed into the bleecher. I haven't done that since. Its a bigger drop than that truss was, but it was not an accident.
 
soundman1024 said:
I'll never forget the time I got electrocuted on the truss about 8 feet high by a strand of Christmas lights. I really didn't think it was Christmas lights because it was enough to make me just hop off the truss. I was about 12 at the time. Thats the most shocking experience I've had, and the biggest accidental fall. Christmas lights pack more of a punch than I thought they could. Fuses or breakers didn't trip or blow, thats what I find odd. Another thing I am remembering is the time I though I could jump out of the front of the sound booth, and I did not decide if I was going to try to land on the bleecher seat or on the concrete (carpeted but still hard) floor. I landed with my feet half on the bleecher so I fell onto the floor, my legs went out, my butt slammed on the bleecher, and continued to the floor and my head whip-lashed into the bleecher. I haven't done that since. Its a bigger drop than that truss was, but it was not an accident.
I HATE Xmas lights. I was doing a christmas show this year and the SM had the great idea. Lights around the procenium arch! Woohoo! So I'm up on the A-Fram totally interrupting a rehearsel stapeling xmas lights to the wall. When suddenly, the staple goes right through the coord. So, I start allllllll over again.
 
Im the technical director and senior lighting tech at our school theatre and during one show where i was feeling particulaly under the weather, i did not do a light check before the show as i normally do, to insure that all lights are working. The entire time before the show, i spent consoling the stage manager as i was particularly interested in her and she had just failed a major test and potentially failed a course. The junior techie who was running the board did not notice the dim lighting conditions until half way through the show i noticed that the main breaker for all our lights was not thrown on. As we were renting half of our dimmers for that show, those 12 had not been installed on the same circuit and were in an always on state. For the first half of the show we had run on only the front bar, so we were missing all of our fernels, and only had 8 large lecos. ONce i noticed i waited for a particularly noisy moment and threw the breaker back on, fading the lights on.

ive got to go get ready for a Mobile concert and Battle of the Bands coming up next week so i'll have to add my many other moments on later
 
Believe me when I say this didn't happen to me, I was just a by-stander. When I was in high school we had a dance studio presenting their annual dance recital. They were using flash pots, rehearsal went great. except the person controlling them never unplugged the control unit from the wall and the pot was live. Our TD went to refill the pot and never bothered to check the power situation out. He got burnt.

Let me tell you how these things were designed. It was a single gang electrical box with a light bulb socket inside. You would have to take an old 1 amp screw fuse and cut off the plastic top and dump the powder in. Kinda cool in a way. Nowadays hard to find those fuses.

back to my story, He was leaning over the pot screwing in the fuse when Wham!!! and he was smoking. He wasn't happy.
 
MircleWorker said:
Believe me when I say this didn't happen to me, I was just a by-stander. When I was in high school we had a dance studio presenting their annual dance recital. They were using flash pots, rehearsal went great. except the person controlling them never unplugged the control unit from the wall and the pot was live. Our TD went to refill the pot and never bothered to check the power situation out. He got burnt.

Let me tell you how these things were designed. It was a single gang electrical box with a light bulb socket inside. You would have to take an old 1 amp screw fuse and cut off the plastic top and dump the powder in. Kinda cool in a way. Nowadays hard to find those fuses.

back to my story, He was leaning over the pot screwing in the fuse when Wham!!! and he was smoking. He wasn't happy.

This is why there are pyro accidents and why people get injured or killed or clubs burn to the ground.

1. The person who made the pots deserves a beating. A pyro pot should never be live (nor should it have the ability to be live). It is a container, nothing more. An electronic fuse head should always be used.

2. The person using the system also deserves a beating as a pyro system needs to be isolated after the system has been used and MUST have a key switch that cuts the power.

3. The TD can escape a beating but only because of what happened to him. He should either not be playing with pyro or should have ensured that the system was not live. In fact, he should have not been anywhere near it because unless he is operating the system, he shouldn’t be near it.


It sounds like this was a purely amateur thing and I am willing to bet that not one of them had any training or held a license. If they did, they do not deserve to, and should have their license revoked. There is a reason why pyro has to be done by trained professionals – IT CAN KILL PEOPLE.

We all kick up a storm when someone overloads a circuit, doesn’t use safety cables or attempts to balance on a ladder that is perched on a chair because it was easier than getting the lift out. Yet when it comes to pyro, everyone just wants to play because it is so cool! Ask your TD how cool the burns were or how cool it was to have to hose of his shorts before throwing them into the washing machine.

I hold a professional theatrical pyro license, as well as a professional fireworks license and have worked in this industry for over a decade. There are too many cowboys out there that think the rules don’t apply to them or simply just ignore them. Every time there is an accident, it makes my life tougher because there are fewer clients that want to risk using pyro and my insurance premium goes up. There needs to be tighter regulations or more people will get injured.
 
I totally agree with you, Mayhem
 
My stupidest mistake was not unmuting the CD channel during a talent show, so there were, as the MC said, some "long technical difficulties" while the audience waited...and waited...and waited...

The thing that made me not notice the mute was that the mute didn't affect the aux levels, and I was able to hear it through the aux-line monitor that was at my mix position, but I didn't unmute the channel after cueing up. But that was when I was away from my "home base" mix position. I'm used to having the mute indicator lights there that immediately tell me if a channel is muted or not, and the mute also kills all of the auxes.
 
My most recent stupid mistake (and I don't make very many at all) was to drop an AV curtain rod behind a set of unmovable wardrobes...the look on the director's face was classic...especially as she was on the phone at the time.

:twisted:
 
My most stupidist mistakes was when I mistaken a boy as a girl and ask her out for for some fun. I was embarrassed when I realized he is a girl. But the thing is she sound and behave like a girl. Oh no he is a gay. That will be the last silliest mistakes I going to make in my life
 
worst thing I have ever been a part in was one time during a talent show where I was a spot op. The Sound guy was using the telex headset built into our board (a mackie SR56*8) to talk with the rest of us. So some stoner band is first up after intermission, during it a bunch stoners are gathering by the edge of the stage and some of the kids in the band are hanging out on stage. As usual for an event like this we were killing time by talking smack on heads about the band, they play get off stage, the change over happens, and one of our techs get on heads backstage and tells us that he could hear us talking over the onestage monitor, something which until then we thought was impossible, becasue the two systems are not connected. We found out there was a bleed somewhere in the soundboard and since have gotten it fixed. Luckly for us the bleed was faint and we were playing music so what we said wasn't heard over the system. Moral of the story, watch what you say on headset!
 
iammike said:
My most stupidist mistakes was when I mistaken a boy as a girl and ask her out for for some fun. I was embarrassed when I realized he is a girl. But the thing is she sound and behave like a girl. Oh no he is a gay. That will be the last silliest mistakes I going to make in my life

Not getting this by way of spelling??? "Oh no he is a gay" and other types of confusion.

Was this guy a guy in not really being interested in you, a guy but a guy potentially interested in you interested in or a guy but you not being interested? Is a gay some form of mutent? Not that I am or in knowing but I do remember some gay men's chorus shows I worked at a time where while the only straight guy on stage, some of the best of shows I ever worked in fun. You got something against gay people, or was it some guy with a poney tail you were attracted to and later found out the negative side of attraction to?

Or was this as advertised a girl that was a guy you asked out for fun? Ah' the prospects in spelling and intent. This much less sex. Some of my best friends are gay. Don't matter in the end I would hope with you a with all in our industry. You choose what you find you wish but respect those of other choices. A friend of mine recently got married. He in the past kept his coice in men secret for the most part. You know, who cares in the end if your friend. lets see the wedding ring in hoping the best for your friend.

A choice by you in people you wish to invite out for a night with I hop in no way has a reflection with those you at work or more so find an interest in as a friend if not your choice for relationship. Those what are not your choice but close you find in mistake that should instead be a friend, perhaps can be a good friend and one that is close otherwise shhould you not push them away. Your mistake should not mean your mistake means someone you would not make a friend. I would hope all with friends respect their own choices also and when someone finds a match much less chooses to wear a wedding ring, that choice and wedding ring is both equally respected and looked at with some extent of you go girl at least if not in lookng at the ring some, lots of support for a friend that has tied the knot.

At least I would hope those of our trade wish happiness on others where ever they find it. If not your choice in guy over peraps girl, I would hope the choice in guy a friend over a problem in your choices.
 
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recent dumb thing I did, for a talent show I created a fake electric with a drop box, I switched one of these circuits over to non dim and parked it to power the mac 550's I had rented. During one song I would black out my light board and then start running cues of the hog for the movers, but the lights never worked, in the last reh I notteced that when I hit black out the movers must have lost power as well, even though they were parked.
 
What I got out of it was that he asked a guy out thinking he was actually a girl. Then to add to the akwardness the guy turned out to be gay, potentially thinking that mike was gay as well. But I agree, that was a hellofa doosie to interpret. (sp.)
 

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