Bloganuay – Jesse Kuntz

I received a cryptic text two days ago from a co-worker. She asked if I could potentially move my travel day up from the 13th to the 12th next month. I responded that I could and asked what was up. She only replied, “90°.”

The project I am working on is in San Francisco next month. There are two identical events that happen back to back. One in January and a similar one in February. Same organization, different internal groups. They utilize the same room layout and have for years.

The January event went off without a hitch but for some reason, the second group decided they wanted to shake things up. They wanted to turn the room 90°.

On paper, this seems easy enough; however, it is not.

It requires completely re-engineering rigging and cable paths and backstage footprints and case storage and front of house control and audio layout and lighting deployment. . . etc. We would have to work fast and focused for the few weeks remaining before the event.

It’s a lot to rotate 90°.

But I waited.

I receive an invite to a teams meeting with the subject being, “Room Redesign 90°.”

And I waited.

thirty minutes before the meeting an email marked urgent came out confirming that we were indeed NOT rotating the room 90°.

I have been in this line of work for a long time. I knew I needed to let the dust settle before making any big changes. One thing truly drives everything in our industry. Cost.

The cost of the 90° turn was too high.

Strategic procrastination utilized properly can deter a great amount of stress. Use with caution.

Thank you for reading.

There are many lies I tell myself but “It could be worse” is the most frequent.

I work in the live event industry and I use this lie many times while working to get through rough spots. There are a lot of rough spots. There seem to be more rough spots post-pandemic.

Equipment not showing up or showing up damaged, labor not showing up or showing up unprepared, and rules that no one could possibly know being enforced. Two of these typically happen on any given event I work on. All three happened on the last one and I just kept having to tell myself, “It could be worse.”

Front view of a show I recently did at the Moscone Center in San Francisco

The event in the pictures is not the last show I did. It was a show I did in San Francisco in October of last year. All the gear showed up, the labor was excellent but the building had remarked all the rigging points in the ceiling and they no longer matched what we had on our diagram of the room. “It could be worse.”

That set us a back a couple of hours but because the other two fell into place; we made up the time and everyone went home at a reasonable hour.

“It is what it is,” is also bandied about quite a bit. I know that phrase annoys people but dang it, some time it is what it is.

Maybe I could add a meditative “OM” to to the end of my lie and it would become a new trend in the mindfulness movement. Just imagine a world in which twenty truck loaders and forklift operators are sitting in the siddhasana pose chanting “It could be worse, Ommmmmmmmm,.” while seagulls dig for scraps in nearby dumpsters and diesel fumes fill the air.

Deep breaths everyone.

Thank you for reading.