Today was a complete bitch of a day, and I’ll never know how I kept my mouth shut. The duty manager was being a bitch all day, she constantly moaned about not having enough cutlery, or plates, or cups, we couldn’t win, we’re not miracle workers. But what really wound me up was when she said “They never ran out of knives when I was in there at lunchtime”; and “I’m gonna go in there and smack them in a minute”. What do they expect from us, forge new cutlery in-between cleaning, wiping and distributing the dishes. After a while I calmed down a little, although that sort of behaviour isn’t acceptable, and making threats of violence is nothing short of illegal. It’s safe to say if I did open my mouth and retaliate, I would be writing that I had been fired. There are a certain group of staff that think that we don’t work hard in the cleaning room, wrong, if it wasn’t for us, the place would fall apart and it almost did this morning, because the duty manager decided that they didn’t need a trolley out collecting dishes for when I arrived at 9:30, it was busy enough to run out of cups, mugs, plates and cutlery, but no trolley until I got one out at 9:45, which put us behind for the rest of the day, as I left, the other guys were just getting to grips with the backlog. On the speed front, if anything slows us down it’s the machine, it takes about 2 minutes to go through the machine and often we are waiting on stuff to come out to dry it! It’s a job where you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t!
In more positive news, I went to the Phoenix last night to take some pictures and write a review, but instead got roped into doing the sound for the night, as there was a mix up with the soundman. I wasn’t too sure about doing it as I have never done the live sound before, but if I didn’t, the gig wouldn’t have happened! I was surprised how good the sound actually was, considering that I had a 10-minute crash course from the regular soundman, Phil, who had to go to his other job. It’s not half as hard as you would imagine, its just about getting the levels right and tweaking the sound to make it sounds more integrated on the soundstage. Everyone that I spoke to afterwards said it sounded good, as good as when Phil does the sound, although getting S.L.O.T. to sound good was hard as I was fighting a very loud bass amp, I just turned the DI input off in the end and based the rest of the sound around the bass level, although it got louder than I intended it to, at least I can now understand the problems that Phil, Liam and John have to deal with when doing the sound, why don’t bands listen to the soundman, they would sound much better!