HEC weekend, overview

I mentioned that I have no regrets about spending fourteen hours running up and down stairs, hauling ridiculous amounts of lights and wires around while running up and down stairs, taping dozens of meters of wires, and occasionally getting yelled at*.  In other words, working HEC weekend.  That’s because this is college, my opportunity to make dumb decisions experience new things.  Plus we got free food, and the desserts were so worth it.

For those of you who don’t know, HEC stands for Hotel Ezra Cornell, and it’s the hotel school’s event of the year where important people come to cocktails and dinners that have been designed by the school to show off what the hotel students have learned.  The presence of these important people mean that HEC is a high profile event, which means that the whole thing is high stress for anyone in charge of anything more important than making sure no orange wires are showing.  (Guess what I was doing all weekend.)

If you guessed covering a lot of orange wire, you’re right.  As HEC weekend was exactly my second time working and first time setting lights up, I spent a lot of time with the gaff tape and comparatively little time with the actual lights.  Somehow, most of my extracurricular activities seem to believe very strongly in learning on the job.  For example:

Pep band: We haven’t actually rehearsed this song this semester, but let’s play it anyway.  Sight read it and if there are any horn moves, follow an upperclassman.

Rock climbing.  First class, after signing the waiver(s): This is the wall.  The yellow line is the bouldering line.  Go climb anywhere, as long as you don’t cross the line.

Cornell Productions: Here’s a light.  Here are the bases and some extension cords.  Set up the lights.  That’s honestly pretty much what happened when I showed up for my first shift during HEC weekend.

It’s been a lot of improvising, and a lot of learning.  Besides finally sort of figuring out the layout of the Statler (it’s one of those buildings where you can only get to certain rooms using specific staircases . . . kind of like my dorm), I also learned the following: how to mount lights when you run out of washers, ways to minimize gaff use when you only have one mostly used roll left, and what happens when you have to mount a gel without a gel frame.  If you couldn't tell, HEC weekend required a lot of equipment.

Next time: down time at HEC (hint: food and homework), and after that, what I was actually paid to do, including, but not limited to, taping orange wires.

*Not of the “You’re terrible and you’re doing everything wrong” variety. More like the “We have ten minutes before the event starts; gaff everything right now” variety.