We Can't Fix it All

Having a role model isn't a practice that I'm familiar with. I think of when I was a kid, I maybe had one or two people on a list so that if I were asked, I wouldn't sound weird. I think Michael Jordan was one at some point, maybe my Tae Kwon Do instructor, Mr. Lamp, was a real role model for me. It's difficult to say. I've never felt like I needed one, though I did shape my actions around certain people who were close to me in order to please them, but that's not what a role model is in my opinion.

I have a role model now, oddly enough. I'm 23 years old and I picked up a role model. My pastor is a great role model to me because he just seems to have an incredible understanding of things to me. He thinks in a way that is approachable to me, and he's excited about it all the time. I want to be like that. I want to make sense to other people like that.

It's hard to remember that our role models are human sometimes though, and that they will undoubtedly fail us. Today was a rough day for me. I was in charge of front of house audio at church. That's a pretty big responsibility where we're from because we have to do a complete set up from scratch every Sunday in the amount of time that most churches do their sound check. I'm getting pretty crafty and knowledgeable in the ways of that room, but I'm no perfect. I don't think any audio guy is perfect. It's a rough job title though. It's the kind of job that no one gives a damn who you are unless you screw up. The only recognition you will get is negative. I knew that going in, but part of me still expects people to be relatively understanding. Ah, but that's a laugh. People look at a sound guy and they all think, "Hey, I could do that. Just put me behind the board and I'll know exactly what to do." Right. I thought that way once too. The truth is, there's so much to know it's almost impossible find your baring, but you do the best you can with the circumstances you are given. It's all about solving problems in a chain of possibilities as fast as you can. Then, you might just figure out that it's out of your control, much like today.

The senior staff at church wanted to get rid of us volunteers. There's so many glitches on Sundays that they thought it would just be a better investment to hire a staff engineer. That way if anything goes wrong, they can just blame the guy they pay. We like doing it though, so we came up with an alternative answer. We would start communicating better, get tighter in our performance and function more fluidly. Two of us, myself included, actually did spend the past four years studying the arts of Audio Engineering in depth at a university. We're not incompetent or without experience. So that's what we've been doing for the past two weeks or so. The senior staff has very short patience, evidently. There is no room for error, as there shouldn't be, but some things we just can't help.

Today we got everything set up in sort of a tizzy. One of the guys just completely forgot that he was supposed to be there, so he didn't show up, and I ended up calling Matt to come in and help. So Matt gets there and Dax shows up for an hour to help, and we do the best we can. We get things running, I get a house mix, and I set up the recorder and get the proper levels. Things turn out well. The service starts and the pastor gets up to speak. His mic works, but the EQ sounds a little thin, so I asked Eric to come and help me out with it because my ears just felt burned out. His would be fresh and he would be able to tweak the EQ a little more efficiently than I. He did, and again, things were going well. That is until the prayer in between worship songs. The pastor stands up to pray and we note this, so his fader goes up right before he speaks, but... nothing. No signal. What's wrong? A dead battery? Did he turn his mic on? He fidgets with it for a moment on stage, but still nothing. It's nothing on our end, so I run up to check with him once the band starts back up and he sits down. When I got there, I asked him if his battery level was fine and he looked up at me. I'll never forget that face. So much anger forced behind a shroud of disappointment that I had embarrassed him in front of everyone. So when he gets up for the sermon, he told the entire congregation that he was suppressing anger over the failing audio, and he used it as an illustration to talk about God's grace. That's great. I have nothing wrong with an illustration of God's grace. I do have a problem with an illustration of God's grace at the expense of me and the entire tech team. That was not our fault. It was the mic not being turned on when it should have been, but it was turned on on our end. I'm not pointing fingers, but I am. That was not our fault.

The sermon goes on, and the audio sounds pretty good. It wasn't perfect, but it was good. The band plays again, and I'm pretty happy with the mix as well as the recording. So then the sermon ends. I go to finalize the disc that we recorded on, and the burner won't recognize it. I open it up and look at the disc, and sure enough, the sermon is printed on it, but it still fails to recognize. At this point, I'm crushed. This is my fault to, or will be. I thought back to the power surge that we received when someone in the back flipped a circuit earlier in the day. I just thought the power faded, but then I saw my computer and it was shut down, which meant that all the equipment completely lost power too, but most of it will restart itself, unlike my computer. This means that when the disc was put into the burner, it set up the disc properly, but then the power faded and it interrupted the disc. Because of that, I have a feeling that once it had burned everything, it could no longer recognize a continuity in the disc and so it would not finalize. That is just a theory. Perhaps it was just a bad disk, but it was my fault none-the-less.

It's hard to face sometimes, the fact that our role models are human. I was crushed by the look he gave me, and I still can't get it out of my head. Maybe he didn't even realize it at the time. But it causes me to shift my trust a bit. Maybe having a role model is foolish. I should just continue down this road of figuring out how to be my own man. Maybe I'm just to chicken-shit scared to bring it to him. I'm going to wait a few days to ponder on it, and then I might say something, if not for me, then for the rest of the tech team.

Peace and love