February 24, 2004 - 1:56 AM

Damn, Out of the Work Loop

I screwed up at work last week, and because of that, I've not worked sinced Thursday afternoon. I suspected something was amiss when I wasn't asked back onto the session for which I had been assisting. We had worked it out so that I could have Thursday off, since I had just worked 25 hours from Wednesday through Thursday; the only other free assistant filled in for me. I assumed that I would slide right back in on Friday. That didn't happen, and instead, I was told that I might be assisting for another session associated with the original one. But that ended up being cancelled.

When I went in to work today to see if anything new was coming up, I found out that I was the only assistant not working, and that in my place they were using the senior General Assistants (that's what we call the Runner position) on the sessions. Management has been doing this for a while, often when the client doesn't want to pay for an assistant in the room (the G.A.'s will then assist without being on the clock). However, in this case, the client WAS paying for an assistant.

I talked with some of the people, including one of the managers, about why I wasn't working. I had assumed that it was because of a lack of actions on my part Thursday morning that had pissed off the engineer, and they confirmed it. I understood why the engineer was unhappy with me, although the whole situation was a bit of a grey area; if I had done what he later scolded me for NOT doing, I could possibly have been overstepping my boundaries (it required some actual engineering and tweaking of a mix, which is usually something best left to the main engineer). However, if I had taken the initiative and completed the tasks (and really, I had pointed out that certain changes should be made in the mix, and that I could take care of them while we waited for some pieces of gear to show up), we would have been out of there a lot earlier than we ended up being. We were both exhausted and grumpy, and the engineer, who had a lot of things stressing him out about the session, snapped a little at me, futzed with the mix, told me to record various versions of it, and left to get some sleep. When he came back later that night, he talked with the managers and told them he didn't want me on the session anymore.

It wasn't just that one incident that set him off, I think. Throughout the seven days, we had so much stuff going on, using multiple rooms for different artists, constantly switching between songs, swapping out hard drives and cds, it was difficult to keep track of everything. Several times, it took us a while to find exactly the right files to play for the producer, which always makes the engineer look bad (even though it isn't his fault). Then, other times, we had technical problems with the computers and hard drives we were using that slowed us down. One of the hard drives seemed to be messed up, so I deleted files that I thought were no longer being used in order to free up space and try to fix the drive. Wrong move. An hour later, the session came to a halt as we had to go through a half hour of recreating/copying those files from another drive. If I had been more on top of things, I could have helped the session move along more efficiently and taken some of the stress out of the engineer's life.

So, I'm not angry with the engineer for shutting me out. I totally understand where he's coming from, and I'm pretty sure that after this session wraps up, we'll be able to talk things over and be cool again. But what leaves me concerned and miffed is the fact that I was left out of the loop. It would have been nice for one of the managers to tell me, "Paul, Rich says that you screwed up and now he doesn't want you on the session." I could have then explained what happened and, while accepting Rich's decision, asked that the whole thing not be such a big thing as to put me in the doghouse. Because that's what I fear happened. Rumors spread fast in the workplace, and my being "exiled" may have lead to the other assistants not trusting me as well as the managers. Thus, my hard-earned reputation as a responsible, diligent, and intelligent worker might be shot, and until I get their trust back, I'd be working a lot less.

I cleared things up with one of the managers, though, and I'll try to talk with the studio manager tomorrow to straighten things out.

In the meantime, I'm pretty sure that I'll have time to see Victoria at M-Bar on Wednesday, and then again on Saturday at the Derby along with the brilliant Neko Case. And next week, there's a slew of shows happening, including the Like on TUESDAY the 2nd (note this MATT, it isn't the 5th) at the Troubadour.

Now Listening To : Ani DiFranco-Out of Range
Random Thought : Vienna Teng's new album is reviewed in the latest Entertainment Weekly! So is Jonatha Brooke's! Yay!

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