Murphy's Law states: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." This is especially true and especially painful when there is an audience involved.
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Sometimes, in retrospect, it’s clear that a mere word to the wise would have been enough to prevent problems:
I recently provided a sound system for a high profile seminar hosted by the governor of a state that will remain nameless. When it came time for the governor to pose questions to panelists, rather than asking them to move a little closer to the table mics we had placed in front of them, here’s what he did: He unclipped his wireless lavalier and passed it back and forth among the panelists as they attempted a dialogue. Between mic handling noise, lavaliere element overload from holding the mic about an inch from their mouths and a couple of drops to the floor (not to mention tangling the lavalier cable around the arm of the chair) the audio was completely unusable.
The producer for the television production company that hired me was livid (his wrath was aimed at me, not the governor) and the audience was leaving the hall in droves.
The rest of Jeff Harrison’s story details what he took away from the experience,what he’ll do next time and includes some great tips for using lavaliere mics.
 Having backups is a very good idea. Losing track of said backup, not so much:
Dry Cleaners Claim Over 17,000 USB Sticks Were Left in Laundries in 2010
Having a backup of your backup isn’t a bad idea either. Just don’t keep it in you pants pocket.
Perfect application of Principle 1: If you can’t do without it, make sure you won’t have to.
One-time college newspaper colleague, Oliver Mackson, now an investigator for the Dutchess County Public Defender, recently tweeted:
Nancy the senior investigator, after I fumbled a phone conference: “I’d say you need to master the three-way, but you might take it wrong.”
Because audiences are often small, because no tickets are sold, because sometimes the stage is just the part of the conference room nearest the screen, because standing ovations are few and far between, it can be easy to forget that what you do is theater.
Part of what makes theater exciting is never knowing exactly what’s going to happen during any given performance. Sometime theater can be magic, sometimes not so much…
Audience members at a West End play starring Keira Knightley were left baffled when an onstage mishap interrupted a performance.
Stagehands at the Comedy Theatre had to pull down the safety curtain after a chair was crushed as a pillar descended for a new scene in The Children’s Hour on Monday.
. . . .
“Ten or 15 minutes later there was still no announcement but then the curtain went up, there was a different chair and the column had been put back.”
. . . .
A spokeswoman for the play said the chair had been moved slightly off its marked position as cast members exited.
She said: “The nature of live theatre means that occasionally unexpected things happen on stage and need to be sorted as quickly as possible to ensure the smooth running of a show.”
Words to live by.
Getting knocked slightly off your mark (figuratively as well as literally) might get you crushed. Be prepared to get sorted as quickly as possible.
I guess we’re all really lucky that Keira wasn’t sitting in the chair at the time.
The box Kinkos shipped directly to the venue in Orlando just made it to the hotel in time. Good thing that. No one would know how to get from the elevators to the breakfast buffet without directional signage. You pop it open and slide the signs out of the plastic bag. Looking good, plenty big, tastefully designed, mounted on nice heavy foamcore, easel-ready. You lock up and head to the lobby bar for a quick drink before crashing, feeling confident that everything will be good to go in the morning.
You descend bright and early and begin making sure the speaker ready room is set up, etc, etc. Time to put out those wonderful signs…
Which are now really badly warped!
The short ends stick up in the air three or four inches. In a panic you start pushing down on the ends but it begins to feel like the foamcore is about to crack in the middle. Not good. They are so bent they fall forward right off the easels. You’re doomed.
Depending on the particular circumstances, it’s very possible that shipping mounted signage into a warmer, more humid climate can cause it to warp and bend to the point it becomes useless. It has something to do with differences in the way the foamcore and the paper the signage was printed on before it was mounted to the foamcore react to the weather.
If you can, try to get your signs shipped down and opened to the air early enough to see if warping is going to be a problem. You can carefully weigh then down as they acclimate to the being in the tropics. I’ve been told the best bet is to carefully and preemptively slide the signs under your mattress overnight.
Just watch out for bedbugs.
Sometimes, you’re working in an old venue. Real old. Rooms that have seen hundreds if not thousands of meetings, speeches, dances, rallies, fund raisers, etc. Old things can be well worn. Worn in ways that aren’t obvious.
For instance, there was a chain hotel in Bethesda that we used to use a lot that was old but seemed to be aging well. It looked like the ballroom had been renovated at some point. Newish carpeting, reasonably fresh wallpaper and paint. High tech climate control that kept things too cold digitally. The works. However, the electrical outlet must have been overlooked.
We didn’t need a high-voltage power drop. We only had a our laptops, a switch and a couple projectors so we just plugged into the regular wall sockets. Or at least we thought we did.
This socket had been plugged into thousand of times over the years and there just wasn’t enough friction in there to ensure that what was plugged in would remain plugged in. The weight of the cable pulled the plug half way out of the wall as soon as I let go of it. It wouldn’t stick.
This, of course, could be very bad for our stuff.
We ended up securely taping the cord to the wall just below outlet. No biggie.
Always, always have a roll of gaffer’s tape with you when you’re working.
 This list is in no particular order and is completely objective. I hope you enjoy this little retrospective jaunt as much as I have.
August 29th — Four Ways Presentation Mishaps Are Like Zombies…
2) If you allow yourself to slip into panic mode, the zombie/mishap will either eat you brains or infect you and turn you into a mindless, snarling, death-dealing horror. Stay calm.
September 13th — Presentation Disasters A to Z: A is for Anger
Given a choice between working with someone likely to curl up into a quivering fetal ball when things are going wrong and working with someone prone to venting their anger in the same situation, I think I would go with the fetal ball rather than the venter. A fetal ball can be guided to a quiet corner somewhere to whimper quietly while everyone else sorts things out.
March 11th — Clutch Hitting
Can you think of a better description of the kind of person you want to be working a meeting with you? You know the moments we’re talking about here. Lamps burn out, speakers freaking out, cable getting kick loose, file corrupt, etc.
June 28th — Promiscuous Sticks
Last weekend, veteran AV pro Rick Pillars, a frequent contributor to BML and owner of It’s a Rap Productions, started a Facebook post with these dreadful words: “So, a bad thing happened yesterday. I plugged my USB drive into the show computer.”
March 12th — Overheard on Twitter: How do you forget to put the parrot on the checklist?
@GraemeLfx just remembered I’ve forgotten the parrot for my presentation. Disaster ~wardsteve (Steven Ward)
Make A Living Writing — Things I Learned During Webinar Fail
Going with a new platform is risky. Anne and I really wanted to start with a free platform because we didn’t know how many tickets we’d sell. But Freebinar had a fatal flaw — it just happened to have a massive dial-in phone line failure at the time of our Webinar. None of us could get on the call. They fixed it right after we finished. So…that didn’t help, and caused about a 12-minute start delay while we tried to figure out a solution.
No matter how many things you nail down, there’ll be one thing you don’t. Years ago, an engineer told me happiness is redundant systems. I took many precations — I had Comcast out to doublecheck my connection the day before. I used a hard-wired mouse instead of my usual battery-powered wireless one. But we still neglected to do one thing that might have saved us — we could have gotten Anne another Freebinar account, with another phone number. That would have given us another shot at staying live.
Backstage at BackstageJobs –Don’t surprise your crew
Honestly, what reason could anyone have for not telling the the crew about these things in advance? What good does it do to hold onto this information? Assuming they “can just do it” falls along the lines of “theatre is magic.” Theatre is magical: to experience. But we’re not using magic to create it, we’re using plans, schedules, computers, gravity, acoustics, and timed choreography (yes, backstage). Throwing a sudden change into this can be a problem, but throwing a planned change at us suddenly makes us mad. Why? Because if we had known about it, we could have done it better.
 Bonjour Events — Preparing your Speakers for the Stage
One conference I was producing was set to start in three hours when I got a call from the car service that the company president, our second speaker on the printed agenda, was no where to be found at the airport. I called his cell to hear, “Oh yeah, I’m catching a ride on a friend’s jet. Oh and I invited Jeff to join me. “ Ah, yes Jeff, our third speaker. I say, “You know you’re on at 1pm?” “Yes, we’re taking off in a few minutes, it’s a fast plane.”
A Collection of Nonsense (Tim Washer) — When PowerPoint Attacks: 6 survival tips
If you forced me to rank the places where I would most prefer not to look like an idiot, the Harvard Kennedy School would come in fourth. Or maybe sixth. Some of history’s most eminent figures have spoken there, like Jack Donaghy. But even after a successful tech-check before the presentation, things can go terribly wrong. Especially if you’ve embedded videos into a powerpoint presentation. I was attempting to show two commercials, but another video popped up, and what’s worse, the audio was out of synch with the video. But here’s what I’ve learned…
Communications from DMN — When a (presentation) disaster strikes
I went blank.
Stage fright. Freezing up. A very pregnant pause. None of those terms really sum up what happened to me during that talk. I went all tabula. As in rasa. It wasn’t pleasant, for me or for my audience.
 Fearless Delivery (Lily Iatridis) — Top Ten True Presentation Mishaps
#2- Vehicle in parking lot just outside the building catches fire and burns to a crisp. The room where I was giving my presentation had large windows just a few yards from the burning vehicle, so we were all mesmerized. Not only that, but the heavy fumes from the burning rubber made us evacuate the room, so my presentation had to be rescheduled. What took the fire department so long?
Public Words (Nick Morgan) — What to do when a speech goes horribly wrong – 5 tips
I once had to give a speech at a Harvard Business School event in one of its very high-tech auditoriums. The speeches were back-to-back that day, and so I had to break my rule of always rehearsing in the room beforehand. The A/V person was nowhere to be found. So naturally the sound didn’t work on the videos I wanted to play. I enlisted the help of a couple of really smart biz school students and the audience as a whole waited patiently with me as they tried to figure out what was wrong.
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