Posting on a regular basis is seeming harder than I thought it would be. I don’t know why …I’ve been to more boring meetings in the past few weeks than I have in the past 2 years. Meetings about everything from housing developments in Lemoore, budget cuts in Madera, to something in Merced I can’t remember. The hardest part is a tie between trying to stay awake and sorting through all the crap for the few bits of info the reporter needs for the story.
I’m starting to see that the smaller the town, the bigger the turnout when it comes to something people in the town don’t like, but most of the time the people holding the meeting aren’t prepared for it. I was at this meeting in Madera a few days ago in the gym of a high school. From past meetings they learned that people get mad when they can’t here you telling them you’re taking something away from them, so for this meeting everybody was mic'd up. From where I was standing it looked like the guy knew what he was doing, everything looked clean and professional….then he turned the mics on.
For like 20 minutes it kept going from too quiet, to ok, to ear bleeding feed back. They whole time I’m thinking man this guy sucks, why isn’t he doing anything. I move over to where I can see the guy sitting at the audio board and it looks like he’s checking levels and trying to fix it. This guy giving a presentation was getting pissed because he had to stop talking everytime the feedback would start. Then they started bringing him new mics, I thought good, they are going to use the house systme and bypass this setup, but no, they just swap it out and the feed back continues.
I tell my reporter that I used to set stuff like this up all the time and she’s practically pushing me out of my seat to go fix it. (Did I mention that we sit around for atleast an hour duing these things? It only takes a few minutes to get the video I need and there’s always a huge gap between the city or school or whatever’s statement and the community reaction or oposing view.) Anyway, I’m sitting there looking over everything trying to figure out what the problem is before I go up there…and that’s when I see it. One of the speakers it pointed out to the crowd like it should and the other is pointed right at about 8 mics. Now I’m faced with the task of walking up there and doing this guys job for him, but how do I do it and not be a dick?
Where this guy is setup is right in front of the whole crowd, so as I walking up everyone can see me. I ask the guy if everythings ok and he says “yeah, no problem”, uh buddy, maybe you’re already deaf, but you’re about to put us all in the same boat. I tell him I used to set this stuff up and ask him if I can help. He says no, but I say anyway, “Do you mind if I turn the speaker out?” he replies “Do you think it will fix it? (WTF?) “I think it will help!” He says something about them not being able to hear last time, I don’t know if that means that’s why the speakers and mics are there or that’s why the speaker is turned in.
I walk over, turn the speaker about 90 degrees and give him the nod to turn the sound back up. The guy up front asks if everything’s ok and he tells him yeah, not a word to me. He starts in on his presentation again, loud and clear, no feed back, and our ears stop bleeding. I make my way back and get a few claps from the crowd and a bunch of ladies sitting next to us giving me a thumbs up mouthing thank you.
The highlight of my week.
