I have worked as the tech-crew on a school social for the first time.
I never believed it could be so stressful, amusing, pointless and fun all at the same time.
To be fair, I did less work than anyone else, due to my lesser knowledge. Even so, it was incredibly difficult. So it's understandable why Jai doesn't want to do it again.
The tech crew consisted of four people: Myself, Adam (Brother of Glenn, a hacker who has finished school), Leigh (A fellow nerd, and of the opinion that nerds are better than anyone else), and my good friend Jai, who, due to his knowledge, gets lumped into doing everything vaguely tech or sound related for the school.
We started several days before the actual event. In all, we spent around seven good free periods setting up lights and organising.
On the day, we started at lunch. Jai and I had a free, and IPT (Counts as a free) last two periods, so we started. Jai got to work a little earlier, so I was unable to find him in the computer room where he was meant to be straight away.
I spent lunchtime playing games on my home PC in the school computer lab. I must explain our plan here. Amy, a non-nerd, had brought in her pc *cough* Shitbox *cough* with all the music stored on mp3 format. We needed it on CD form, so she had to bring it in, so as to connect it to an external cd writer. I, meanwhile, had brought in my system so as to connect to a digital projector, and play Winamp AVS on the ceiling of the dance floor.
So there I was, playing Unreal Tournament in class, while Jai fiddled with the system. We needed to get Amy to make playlists, as the popular music consists of shitty rap, whilst we all prefer, um, good music. Therefore, we didn't know what tracks to play. Also, my contingency plan of bringing in my most popular music would be pointless, as it wasn't shitty enough.
It turns out Amy forgot to bring her blank CD's, so we stole some from school. After wrecking two and getting error messages, we remember Leigh's wise words.
"That external Cd drive is shitted"
By now, school had ended, and we were short on time. We split into two teams, Jai and Adam to get the venue set up, and Leigh and myself to get the music happening.
We opened up both cases, since we needed to get the files onto my system, as it had a burner.
The first, Amy's, had an atrocious pink colour scheme on Windoze, as well as a naming scheme consisting of capitalising alternate letters.
Inside was a Cyrix chip.
A Cyrix chip that was part of the motherboard.
This was termed "Like buying a Russian Car"
Then we opened my box. I discovered why, when I purchased my system, the vendor was unable to "fit in" a TNT 2, replacing it with a Voodoo 3 PCI 16Mb. My crappy motherboard had no AGP slot.
We stole a few Network cards and got to work on creating a network. Over this period of time, I changed from my uniform to a black trench coat and ninja hood. What, you expect me to run a social and not dress like a ninja?
After an hour of trying to install drivers and needing to reset the fucking bitch, we were unable to get a network happening. So, Leigh switched the hard drive over to my computer. He placed it as master on the same channel as my burner.
The system failed to boot up.
Leigh took out the drive, switched the jumpers to slave, and put it back in my system.
It booted up. Our next challenge was to reassemble the playlists, since we had just changed the files from drive C to D. After that, we let it burn at four speed.
We managed to get all three CD’s done, with much waiting, eating of pizza, paying out of Amy’s computer, and more waiting. Of course, I stole the mp3’s while they were there. Some of them were good. (Note to anyone wanting to arrest me for piracy: This is of course, utterly false. ::crosses fingers behind back::)
It was then that my system was rushed over to the venue to set up the projector. We then started the shitty music. Inexplicably, every teen idiot screamed between songs, despite the fact that every song had both no musical merit whatsoever, and they were all exactly the same.
We kept getting requests, to which the answer was no. We kept getting people coming out through the wrong door, so we barricaded it with a block of wood. We got some free drinks, and continued.
I entered a rapping competition, with MC Frontalot’s Penny Arcade. The first place went to someone with no rhythm at all. The second place went to someone who did not rap, but beat boxed.
Unfortunately, we were not able to use the strobe much, due to the music being shit. Two decent tracks were played. When “Grease” was splayed, I was requested to change tracks. I replied in the negative. When asked why, I responded, “Because I like this track”
The second, "Who let the dogs out?", was only good insofar as Jai and I changed the lyrics to “Who let the sluts out? Hoe, Hoe Hoe Hoe.” This was directed at every female on the dance floor.
At the end, we packed up. Jai pulled out a plug, and it arced. Luckily I pulled out my computer 3 seconds before. Had I not, the bios would have jammed.
We were unable to put the sound desk away, as we didn’t have the key to unlock the cupboard.
The first thing in the morning, Jai was complained to for not putting it away.
Just for that lack of gratitude, Jai is no longer going to do the socials.