I Really Should Know Better...

Are you one of those people who, when enjoying a trul pleasant day, always has a feeling of foreboding, purely because "..nothing goes this well without then going horribly wrong"?, No....Well, welcome to my life!

I have a really good day yesterday, one that made me remember why I enjoy working on Cruise Ships. It was Sunday, I had a duty at 9am and then nothing until 8pm because I was supposed to be going to Pisa. Due to the fact it was raining and some randoms from TUI turned up me and some others got unceremoniously chucked off our tour but in the end tyhat was great!

Me & Vicks had a loungy morning watching "Born and Bred", I had Hot Chocolate with Gareth in the OKL whilst heckling Gavin and 'New Boy' (Iain - our non-techie). Then we borrowed Cluedo and headed down the stairs where various waifs and strays from the Ents team joined us for a game. I left to teach kids juggling and when I came back they'd moved on to Girls vs Boys Pictionary. Needless to say we whooped them! Then someone had the ingenious idea of Bingo, so we all put something in for the prize and we borrowed the crew bingo machine. We had a strip of 6 tickets each and Gav called. You could have heard a pin drop!

The Show in the evening was hysterical. Factors included the appaling weather, everyone having had a very relaxing Sunday, the fact that it was impossible to walk in a straight line never mind dance or do acrobatics, certain persons changing the words to a song (which only has ONE word in it) and the on going game of "tig on stage!"

Should've known that today was gonna bite me really.

Got up early for crew drill - cancelled
Doing Staging - Car Wash rollers need mending - glue gun sticks too big
try to cut them - slice through tumb nail and index finger on left hand.

Can't fix the star cloth, which is beginning to really annoy me

Rehearsal goes OK, except the MAC's are being a pain.

One won't turn off, try everything, including switching off and on (fast becoming the solution to everything!) and then the board crashes.

Q's work but the Technobeams and MAC's have to be controlled manually and fired up manually. Spend 2 hours trying to fix the problem. Phone Rich, then Martin who rings Compulite. Compulite say to 'Cold Start' It. The One thing Dante specifically told me NOT to do was to cold start the desk as it would wipe all the text from the Qlists and who knows what else. So I decide to save that option until after the show and Deck party.

During the show the board crashes when I press the 'back' button. The spot boys do a sterling job whilst I reboot it and pray!

Show finishes, Deck party is inside because of the weather, which is cool as it works well in here. However avbout 1/3 of the way through something (I give up by now!) triggers the House Tabs relay and down they come. Everyone else found it funny, I just felt like crying!!!

So since that has finished I have been sat in the little booth with my Twix and OJ (supplied by Danny!)trying to salvage the shows and my sanity. I held my breath and did a cold start (not that that's simple either!) and lo and behold it wiped the text, the subs everything.

So finally at 4:30am after routing through the saved files on the desk and the disk I found the 'Autosave' file where someone had very thoughtfully locked all the files from May. So now I have the complete collection of show cues (if not entirely uptodate!) Hurrah - and it's only 6am!! Now all I have to do is find soemthing to do until 9am whern I have to get up and put the BGM on !!!c :((((

There was one bit of good (sort of) news today. Due to the rioting in Corsica (Scary!) we will be in Beautiful (but boring!) Olbia tomorrow and so will....... The Spirit!! Yey I get to see folks :)