I'm an A/V monkey working for a large college within a larger university and I live in a projection booth. "A/V" means "audio/video", roughly "sound and sight", and pertains to the type of technology I use. A/V can mean any sort of television production, but in this job I mostly project various types of media. "Booth" is the projection booth, a 10' x 25' room that sits in the back of a large, 600-seat auditorium. No real windows, there is a single, long window that overlooks the auditorium and the stage. "Monkey" means that I do any sort of A/V job the college needs, which used to mean "projectionist" but now includes all types of general media support. My job title is "Media Support Specialist", and we snicker at what that might mean.
I've been an A/V guy for a long time. I got involve in high school in the A/V Club, which meant pushing carts with attached televisions and VCR players from a storage closet to different classrooms . High-tech in 1980. I remember Health Class used was A/V heavy, as the instructor, the girls' gym coach, played movies and slept off hangovers during her morning classes. I went from high school to college, first as an English major but I changed to Television and Radio Communications once I discovered how my recreational lifestyle destroyed my GPA. It's hard to critique American Lit loaded, although I'm sure some pull it off. I, on the other hand, can direct and produce television shows when loaded to the gills. Thus, if I went to keep up my daily intake of marijuana and alcohol I had to change majors. I've never found television production particularly difficult, and I don't know if that speaks of my aptitude for it or the nature of the business. An old joke: Do you know why television is called a medium? Because it is not rare and it is not well-done.
So yes, first day, seven classes each holding approximately 500 doe-eyed students, many of them freshmen and understandably lost in the fog of their initial college experience. Wander in, list to 50 minutes of a lecture, wander out, repeat. The lectures are economics, marketing, nutrition, oceanography, evolution, I can't remember them all. I've been doing this for longer than a decade, so I've heard it all before. Not only does the material not change, the jokes, personal stories, and impromptu asides remain the same as well. I'm not complaining - am I complaining? - merely recording. I like the professors I work with, although technically most of them are lecturers and not professors, a distinction academia makes in its intellectuals' rankings. Anthropology, that was a fun course. Lots of information, packaged and sold within these ivy-clad walls, which really are draped in ivy.
And I sit in the back, schedule the room, dim the lights, play the DVD when cued, guide professors through connecting a laptop to the projector, operate the sound board, and try to stay mentally sound. It gets difficult. I am essentially trapped in a box listening to extremely dry, stodgy academic lectures about the mundane genetics of fruit flies for eight hours a day, with no fresh air and no sunlight. I think they tried that at Guantanamo Bay but found it too cruel, spiking the prisoner suicide rate to unacceptable levels. I used to smoke cigarettes, which was brilliant and got me out of the building, but became too hard on my aging body.
So, no smoking, no escape, I thought I'd start this semester with a new blog describing my booth adventures. For those who might vicariously enjoy the banal existence of a A/V Monkey locked in a Booth, stand by. I hope it gets funnier as we go along, which paradoxically is the same hope I have for my personal life.
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