Just Keep Coiling, Just Keep Coiling

When I got back to Cornell for spring semester I figured that since I wouldn't be writing fifteen page lab reports or analyzing phase diagrams for hours on end I should get a job.  With my extensive work experiences (i.e. none) I set out to find a job that I would enjoy but that would still employ me.  To make a not-very-long story shorter, I was hired by Cornell Productions.  After going through all the paperwork, I finally worked my first shift last Friday.

I was given the prestigious position of stagehand.  For the first part of the night, I sat backstage and listened to jazz for two hours.  In middle school, I joined the jazz band, but the market for jazz clarinet is about the size as the market for electric pickle lights.  Which is to say, just about zero.  Since then, I have played very little jazz and don’t listen to it much either.  That said, the concert was pretty good.

It’s a different experience, hearing a concert from backstage.  It’s both louder because of how close you are and harder to hear because everything’s set up to project sound out toward the audience.  But I wasn’t getting paid to sit around and listen to jazz; my actual job was to be ready if the Bailey Hall staff needed anything in the case of any sort of disaster.  Fortunately, they didn’t, and after the show was when my real work began.

Once the audience left, the other stagehand and I, plus the sound technicians, got to work.  For whatever reason, the jazz band that had just performed needed something like twenty microphones for their ten member group.  For every single one, we had to take the microphone off the stand, untangle the stand from the sea of wires covering the stage, and then collapse the stand.  After that, we got to coil the sea of wire spaghetti.  Because, you know, mikes don’t work if they’re not plugged in.  (Yes, I am aware that wireless mikes exist . . . didn’t use any of those on Friday.)

And these weren’t wires like wires for your laptop charger or to plug in your kitchen blender.  These were giant fat wires (because a larger cross section means a lower resistivity and a lower chance of a stage covering in burning wires), and some of them stretched out across the entire stage.  Let’s just say that coil wrangling should be a new Olympic sport or something like that.

Once the stage was cleared off, we stored everything where it was supposed to go, and that ended my first work experience at Cornell (or anywhere, really).  I have to say that I really liked working backstage, and I actually don’t mind coiling, no matter what it sounds like earlier in my post.  So, yeah, I like my job.