Work Stories: Episode 50: Don't Cross the Beams

Previously on Work Stories, I told you about the person who called my work asking if we were having a dinner and dance for New Year’s Eve.  It was a strange question that I still haven’t gotten over.  This week, it’s the fiftieth Work Story, so I’m going to make it a good one.  Or I will try as much as I can to make it an exciting story.  Let’s see what I’ve got.

I’m going to revisit the time that I worked at the Niagara Falls New Year’s Concert.  If I haven’t already written about it, I’ll tell you what happens there.  If I’ve already written about it, I’m going to write about it again.  Each year, Niagara Falls has a free concert for people to enjoy as they usher in the New Year.  I’ve worked at that concert twice, and I’ve been to the concert every time since then.  When I worked there I did many things.  I’ve helped set up the lights, I’ve moved band equipment, I’ve build stages and lighting/audio towers, I’ve helped move trailers, and I’ve run the spotlights.  The story I am about to tell involved the lighting tower.

One of the lighting towers was also the audio tower.  There were two floors to the tower.  On the bottom floor was all of the audio equipment.  Actually, saying that it was all housed there is wrong.  It didn’t hold instruments or speakers.  It was the audio boards for the mixing of the live music.  On the top floor, the lighting boards were located, along with the spotlights.  I don’t know if I described all of that before, but I just said it all again because it’s relevant to this week’s story.

To build the tower, it’s like K'nex.  I feel like I’ve gone through this before, so I’ll skip over actually building the tower.  When we were done, we brought all of the lighting and audio equipment inside.  Then we noticed one rather large problem.  In order to allow the lighting board guy to see the stage, the two spotlights we had that year had to both be on the same side of the tower.  This meant that one of the crossbeams holding the tower up was in the way of the spotlight.

The other spotlight guy had the bright idea that the crossbeam had to move.  He got the hammer and knocked out the piece of metal that was holding the crossbeam in place.  Then he moved the crossbeam and that’s when the shit hit the fan.  The centre of the second floor of the lighting tower sagged downward.  I dove out of the tower as quickly as I possibly could.  I wasn’t going to go down with it.  The whole thing looked ready to collapse.

The first attempt to fix this catastrophe was to try and get the crossbeam back into place.  However, the sag in the middle of the second floor had lowered the connector piece so far that the cross beam couldn’t reach it.  We needed a plan, and we needed a plan fast.

I’m not entirely sure who initiated the plan but here is how it went.  The biggest guy who was working at the concert was brought in to hold up the floor.  One of the other guys and I ran over to where the tower parts were stored.  We had to find two pieces.  One was to be a straight pole that could fit into the connector.  The other was a jack that could lift up the pole.  I got the pole fine.  It was easy to get out of the bin that it was in.  The jack was more difficult.  The jack was in a bin that had another bin on top of it, and the only way to move the bins was with a forklift.  I had to get the jack out without moving the bin on top.  There was just under enough space to get it out snug.  I spent about five minutes struggling to get the jack out before it finally came free.

The rest of the story isn’t important until the point at which we safely got the crossbeam back in place.  The plan had worked.  The floor was once again stable.  That night, we successfully put on the New Year’s Concert.  No animals were hurt during the time of that story.

That’s it for the Work Story.  It really fizzled out toward the end, but I have nothing else to say about what happened.  The crossbeam went back into place, and all of the problems were solved.  It was nice and neat at the end.  It’s also been about six years since I’ve worked there, so I might not remember all of it exactly.  What I do remember is the moment of fear when I jumped, and what we had to do to fix it.  That’s what I wrote for you to read.  I’ll be back next week with more for you to read.

Until then, I probably did in one of my drunken stupors.