Student Asks Christ for A/V Help

Falling to his knees, a Teaching Assistant (TA) for ECON 1110 crossed himself before plugging in a borrowed power cable, silently asking Jesus Christ for aid. The student, Seung, forgot to bring the power cable to a portable data projector, used to supplement the main projector in the auditorium. Projected at a side screen, Seung is responsible for setting up the projector and laptop, connecting the two devices together, and plugging both into an electrical outlet. Panic ensued when he realized he didn't have the cable. The professor mentioned to me that Seung forgot a cable. Assuming it was a VGA cable, which connects a laptop to a projector, I grabbed a spare and headed to the front of the auditorium. Once there, I discovered that Seung had a VGA cable but not a power cable. Looking at the power input plug on the projector, an older model NEC, I saw that it wasn't a standard, three-prong plug, but a semi-propitiatory two-prong plug.

"I don't think I have one of those," I said, and Seung, already nervous and worried about the consequences of forgetting the cable, started pacing a small circle and anxiously wringing his hands. I walked back to the booth thinking, if I have one I'll give him one, but if I don't I don't and it's not really my problem. Lo and behold, I had one. I returned and plugged it into the projector and gave him the other end, meant for the outlet. He bent to his knees, crossed himself, looked toward the ceiling, and plugged it in.

Whirrrr, as the projector lit up and its fan came up to speed. I smiled. Seung, already behind with other responsibilities, said, "thank you" and hustled to his next task. I think I have a shitty job sometimes, but not nearly as shitty as a graduate student's. Yes, he has a more promising future, maybe, but at the moment Seung is one of the hundreds of graduate TAs who do most of a professor's work for little pay and flimsy promises. "You'll be a professor one day." Well, not if current economic trends continue. The Econ professor can't even remember Seung's name. Dang. Well, I'll remember you Seung, because while I've seen a lot of weird shit in here, I've never seen someone cross themselves and genuinely ask God for aid. That is cool.

Warning, Warning: User Approaching

Most of the gear works fine. It works well. The projector, a bad-ass Christie LW650, can read almost any resolution you throw at it, and with 6,500 ANSI lumens it projects a splendid image. I've installed a compliment of standard, durable Shure wireless microphones run straight into the Soundcraft Spirit8 and when the speaker stands on the stage and wears the microphone where he is supposed to, the sounds great. The only anomaly to the system is, as always, the user.

Most of the presenters in the room are lecturers teaching a class of 500 students, most of whom are using their laptops to simultaneously surf The Facebook, watch YouTube, and chat with their neighbors. The good lecturers proceed, ignoring the dull-eyed herd and concentrating on the subject matter and the 15% that is playing attention. The bad lecturers try to control the crowd, making rules and regulations - "Absolutely no laptops!" - having their teaching assistants patrol the isles, and inventing a hundred hoops for the kids to jump through. Student Response Systems measure attendance, and everyone knows that. It is easy to cheat. Apparently Cnut's attempt to control the tide has been forgotten by the vast majority of contemporary academia.

The current user, the dude in front right now, isn't necessarily a bad lecturer, but he sure is high maintenance. Because he turns his head away from the clip-on lavaliere microphone when he speaks, going "off mic" as we say in the biz, he wants me to buy him a headset mic, one worn about the head like a pair of glasses. "Sure thing, Madonna." First I tell him to buy it, but then thinking of all the problems involved if he shows up with only a mic, I wince. I'll buy it and connect it to a spare transmitter pack with the right frequency and try to keep it separate from the mix of microphones that is good enough for everybody else. That was Monday and today (Wednesday) he asked where his new mic was. His new mic? Oh brother.

So he sets up his laptop and his uses his remote controller for his laptop and it doesn't work. He asks me why. How should I know? It's his remote. He asks me if I have spare batteries for him. It is not my responsibility to supply batteries for every yahoo that wonders in with dead batteries. I have batteries for the room's gear, not batteries for everyone.

This might be harsh. I was told that this lecturer was "a nice guy". I haven't seen that yet. I've met a whinny, spastic, needy guy, who wants a lot more out of me than the vocational contract I have with the university. I'm sorry to say, "That's not my job," but dude, that's not my job.

Rereading this, I sound pretty pissy. Must have been a bad day. The lecturer I mentioned is high maintenance, but that is okay. The reason I am here is to help lecturers. Most of the people I work with are nice, and even the high maintenance ones aren't bad. They just need more hand-holding. Good thing I have huge hands.

24 August 2011: First Day of Classes

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.