This hour marks my thirtieth in the office since Sunday.
Last night was the soft re-opening of Alice Tully Hall. There were fifty dinners across the city, hosted by board members, benefactors, and big donors across the city. At the end of all those dinners, folks got tickets to the soft-open, where there was a gala, performances, speeches, and lots of flashy stuff.
I was on call all weekend, as the fundraisers made frantic changes to all thier lists and labels, tickets and seating charts.
Sunday, I got a call from my boss regarding some signifigant issues we were having regarding a centerpiece of the evening’s speech by the President of LC, a scrolling list of donors to the Capitol Campaign, divided by donation amount.
Holy fucking clusterfuck, Batman.
The press office, deciding they knew better than anyone, didn’t use our in-house, multiple emmy-award-winning media group, and instead hired some hack consultant group, who essentially provided equipment and a warm body. The equipment, mind you, was a pretty standard A/V rack, which couldn’t be programmed into the board (hence the warm body, to press buttons) and ONLY had VGA/RGB in, and two three hundred pound giant projectors, which, I shit you not, they had sitting on a fold-out table. The projectors had to keep getting re-adjusted for focus, because the table was bowing under thier weight.
Nobody had the software, skills, or expertiese needed to make this work right – 30 hours later (and fucking seven, yes SEVEN) last-minute changes to the video, and we got something the president, and all the other chefs around the soup-pot were happy with. We started in Powerpoint, then Finalccut (which was even less help) and I finally threw something together in Flash, which seemed to scale well.
I’m pretty sure I am coming down with something – my throat is sore, and I am coughing a little – in no small part, that is because of the stress and schedule I’ve kept in the last 48 hours.
The point is, I’m fucking tired.
