Chan's Personal Blog

You may have noticed a lack of updates recently, but luckily there's a story about why. In mid-December, I got an e-mail from one of the staff at the church asking if I could help run the sound system for a New Year's Eve event that was happening. I thought, okay, a small show, that'd be fine. It'd probably be a two evening commitment at most; one night for a band to reherse, and one night for the actual show. So, we left it at that, and I thought I'd have this lovely week off from work.

This is the only time of the year where I actually take holidays for rest. You can ask anyone at work, and they'll tell you that the only time I take a holiday is if I have to study for exams, and that's not much of a holiday at all. After four years at my work, I have accumulated a crapload of vacation days and overtime hours. I could take almost 2 months off to burn through all those vacation days.

Anyway, after Christmas, I get an e-mail about the rehersal times, and a list of the bands that were coming in. Turns out there's going to be five different bands playing at the New Year's Eve event. That means that most bands want rehersal times with the sound guy, and time to setup their gear. This has snowballed into a really big event which I have been drafted into. One band coming in consists of professionals who has record deals with Time Warner for crying out loud.

So, I have been doing sound stuff on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. This is by no means a small commitment, and it is all volunteer work. I even had to skip part of a birthday party to give one of the groups some stage time.

You'd think that people would appreciate it that I was giving up all this time to help setup the stage, and give people rehersal time. Most of the bands that I have worked with this week have been great, except one. Saturday's band was a nightmare. Their leader liked to micromanage everything, so they'd play four bars of music, and he'd stop to criticize his band members. Repeat this about a hundred times. In two hours, they got through only four songs I think. Morale was fairly low, and people were getting ticked off.

Anyway, their rehersal time was scheduled for Saturday between 6pm-9pm. At 9:40pm, I politely asked how much longer they were going to be, and the music lead said they had all night still. I said, no you don't, the agreement was 6pm-9pm, and I have already given you an extra 40 minutes. The guy then goes, "Pfft, you Pentecostals and your rules." I think this guy just dissed my entire church denomination. This really ticked me off. I have been here the last few days working countless hours for free, and this guy has the nerve to complain. If their band stopped arguing, they would have gotten through a lot more music. This guy was absolutely out of line. In either case, I told him that he had until 10pm, and I was kicking everyone out.

It's kind of annoying when people don't appreciate your work. I could have been at a birthday party this week. I could be spending New Year's Eve with friends. I could have done a lot of things this week, but I answered to the call of duty.

I was pretty close to burning out this week, until I watched an inspiring interview with Senator Obama. The interview was discussing what was wrong with America today, and the senator said that society rewarded those who are rich, those who are famous, but not those that work hard. He said people today are far too concerned about themselves, and how do things benefit themselves; there needs to be a new effort to focus on serving, ask yourself, are you a useful member person? Does serving other people come first?

This interview reminded me of Kennedy's famous quote, "ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."

So, that has helped me. Anyway, I have to get ready for a 12 hour show for tonight. I'm going to need a vacation after this vacation.

Pardon my rant, I'm a bit tired, a bit bruised, and a bit lonely. Now I remember why I didn't choose sound engineer as my primary professional.

Every week I help out at a community drop-in centre which is hosted at my church where kids from the community come and hang out. We have a lot of different activity for kids, including soccer, floor hockey, video games, crafts, singing lessons, etc.

In either case, there are quite a few kids from the community that live in fairly difficult circumstances. Some of them are fairly out of control as a result. Anyway, on Tuesday, I was cleaning up because the kids were leaving, and this nine year old girl comes up to me, and she has a roll of lipstick in her hand. She proceeds to start drawing on my arm with the lipstick. I tell her to stop, but then she proceeds to smear lipstick on my shirt. At this point, I whack the lipstick out of her hands, and she darts off to the girls' washroom which is a no-fly zone for me. My hands had globs of lipstick on them, and they were a bright shade of red. It took forever to wash my hands clean.

Anyway, I was fairly ticked off, and those who know me well are aware that I rarely lose my cool. The sound system could fail during a live performance, or the servers at work could be under hacker attack, or I could be under heavy paintball fire from superior forces, and in all those situations, I'm calm and collected. I was just ticked because the event was so random, and lipstick stains clothes, and the kid had no respect for other people. Getting lipstick on my arms and hands, fine, but when you ruin people's clothes, that's a different story. I'm all for pranks as long as people's stuff doesn't get destroyed.

I spent the night scrubbing my clothes with liquid ultra Tide. I don't have much experience with lipstick... you know, due to the lack of a girlfriend and all, but I now know that the stuff is oil based, and fairly waterproof. After an hour, I managed to get most of the lipstick out of my clothes, and I put it through the wash, and thankfully it didn't stain. Huge waste of time though. Even after a day, my hands still smell like Tide though. Bleh.

The lesson here is, parents, don't give your nine year old daughters lipstick. They're too young to have makeup! Let kids be kids