Work Stories: Episode 20: Loading...

Previously on Work Stories I wrote about an intersection where water would pool and create a flood.  Why did I do that?  I don’t know.  I found it interesting, but I’m surprised I got a whole blog post out of that one.  This week will not be so...I don’t even know how to describe that.  I wrote about an intersection.  Wow.  Okay then.  Onto this week’s Work Story.

I thought that it was about time that I go back to writing about that concert that I helped with.  If you don’t remember what I mean, let me elaborate.  Here in Niagara Falls, there is an annual New Year’s Eve concert.  I’ve helped with that concert twice, and I’ve seen it many more times.  It’s the two times that I worked at it that actually matter for the writing though.  Both years had their ups and downs.  That’s the same with any job, really.  You have your good moments and you have your bad moments.

A lot of the time I spent working there involved the set up and removal of the stage, lighting equipment, audio equipment, any other stages, and some of the band equipment.  I wasn’t so much with the band equipment, though, since I was on spotlight duty during the actual concert.  But I did help get the equipment from the trucks to the stage and from the stage to the trucks.  In order to do this, the concert crew, myself included, had to build a long ramp from the driveway to the stage.  It was heavy equipment, so we weren’t going to vertically lift it.  We would run the stuff from the trucks up the ramp, onto the stage, and deal with it after the truck was empty.  When the concert was over, we packed everything up and ran it down the ramp back to the trucks.  It’s fairly simple.

This week’s story, which isn’t much of a story, came from the second year.  We were packing everything back up into the trucks when it happened.

It was the morning following the concert.  We had all gone home at four in the morning after taking down the audio equipment so that it didn’t get harmed by the weather.  It was now ten in the morning and we were back to start hauling everything away.  We were all tired after the long day that was New Year’s Eve, and the lack of sleep that we got.  But we were doing our jobs.

The first thing to go was the audio equipment that we had already taken down the night before.  There were four of us moving the speakers down the ramp while everyone else was taking down lighting equipment.  The truck was backing up to the temporary loading dock.  We waited on the dock while it backed up.  It kept backing up.  And it kept backing up.  And it backed up some more.

While our supervisor was yelling for the truck to stop, it backed into the loading dock and kept on reversing.  The four of us who were on the ramp and dock dove off as quickly as we possibly could, as the whole thing shifted.  We could hear cracking wood and straining pipes.  The truck finally stopped, but the damage had been done.

We stood there in awe at the slightly twisted ramp that we had been standing on.  Our supervisor spent about ten minutes yelling at the truck driver while we all felt lucky that we weren’t killed.  After a few minutes, we began attempting to fix the damage done.  Some of the boards used for the ramp were too damaged to use, so it took a little bit more work to load the trucks from that point onward.

It was a close call with danger, and we had made it through.  Nobody had been hurt.  It was a good day with a terrible situation.  But we were fine.  That’s all that matters.

That’s this week’s Work Story.  That’s the twentieth Work Story.  There are many more to come.   I hope you enjoyed this one.  Until next time, hold on to your butts.