Those of you that know me well know that I am not one to worry often, or for long periods of time. This is still true of me but sometimes during our shows I catch myself worrying a little bit more than normal. See we run 3 DVD players synced up together and three projectors. We learned how to handle disc skips, and the like, but the idea of having an issue at a school was obviously not appealing. Well today my fear of a show messing up came true! It wasn't just one skip, but several, creating issues for the last 15 or so minutes of our first show.
As I was watching the presentation I all of a sudden realized that the image on our left screen was frozen. My stomach turned to knots (again not super likely for me). In order to fix this problem we have to wait for each DVD player to get past the closest minute.... meaning that if they are at 3:34, you need to wait until all the players go past 4:00. (hope you are tracking!) Well it should be a simple fix. So I did that and everything seemed fine. Not more than a minute after I fixed it the same DVD player skipped the disc 2 minutes ahead. It was terrible and the DVD player wasn't responding so it took even longer to fix (trying having 200+ high school students, and their teachers and principal waiting and watching YOU!). So finally I got it started again. Literally 5 minutes later the same thing happened again! I was so frustrated and felt really bad for the school. So now we had like 8 minutes left in the show. I'm sitting on the floor in front of our equipment staring hard core at our DVD players hoping it doesn't happen again, and praying feverishly as well! The last minute of the presentation the same thing happened. At the end of our show we have phrases going across the screen saying "FACE YOUR FEAR" or "GROW THROUGH ADVERSITY," well because of the problem all they saw was "YOUR FEAR" or "W OUGH VERSITY." I even tried to go back so they could re watch the last minute but it just wouldn't work properly so I stopped it and they left.
I felt so bad for the school although it was not anything that I could have seen coming or fixed differently; our DVD player just decided it didn't want to do its job.We had another show that was supposed to start in 15 minutes. I went to call my boss, who hadn't even made it to the office yet because of time differences (yay for cell phones!)! Trying to call him was hard too because there was barely any cell phone coverage where we were, so we go disconnected and I had to find the "right spot" to stand in order to make the call, which obviously all of this took more time!
We were unsure if the problem was the DVD player or if that DVD was just super scratched, so for the sake of time we changed out both and it worked wonderfully. So the middle schoolers got a great show but unfortunately that wasn't the same deal for high school.
After our morning presentation we had to drive about an hour to another school for an afternoon presentation. It was so refreshing because the students we had helping us were great. They kept making jokes and making me laugh to the point where when I was trying to give directions I couldn't because I was laughing so much! Also the principal was great! We ended up having a good chunk of time before the show started so we were just hanging out in the gym. He ended up coming and just talking with us for a while. It was great to hear him talk about the students and how they relate with the shows we present!
This presentation though was going to be our tester presentation to really see what the problem was. We used the new DVD player but the old DVDs, so one of two things would happen.... the show would run as normal telling us that we had a faulty DVD player earlier, or the second thing would be that the show would mess up like it had during our first presentation showing that the actual discs were bad. I was on the edge during the presentation, especially once we got near to the part that had messed up before. Thank God the entire show went fine!
All this to say, it was a crazy morning and a long day! I just hope the first school will have grace on us because our DVD player decided to die on us in the middle of their show! Well at least I have the experience with these issues for next time (hopefully though there won't be a next time...).
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