Last Monday started early. We were doing chair setup at 8AM and it takes me over an hour to get there so my alarm went off at 6. Unfortunately the complementary breakfast doesn’t start until 6:30. But I had been prepared and had gotten breakfast and lunch the night before.
The day progressed as expected. There was confusion about the order of the racks, some of the temp workers kept going to the bathroom, talking on there phones, or generally griping. I did have a good forklift operator so once the rack order was set, I did not run out of chairs. The 30 min lunch stretched out to 75 min, but that is also normal for setup.
While we were doing setup there was a team washing the big top. Unfortunately that meant there were puddles on the ground and wet shoe prints on the nicely clean and just repainted bleacher boards. But they did clean under the wheelchair seats. they haven’t done that in over a year!
I had Tuesday off and spent it looking for housing. Still no luck. This is really starting to suck. I have extended my stay at the HI to Thursday but that maxes out my stay time. I hope something comes along.
Wednesday was training day. Because of changes to how the pricing is done for ticket sales, I took the box office training again. We are the test for a new sliding price system. When sales for a city open the prices are lower than normal. The price for any given show and section change depending on sales. Kind of like air lines. If you buy early you get better prices. its going to be a pain beacuse we can’t just say the prices are X. Now we have to find out when they want to come and look up the prices for that show. I don’t work the box for a couple of weeks so they should have worked out the issues by the time I have to.
Dress rehearsal went smoothly. Only 52%, about normal. It was no surprise to me that I was working Door 3 Mast guard. My default position, and one of the toughest jobs in the big top, Door 7 wheelchairs is the other one. Clean up went OK but I did have to tell one guy to stop throwing popcorn boxes down the rows. He was sweeping and told me he was multitasking. Right.
Premiere went well for us. Started late, as usual. The normal problems with getting people seated. but it was as expected. Apparently the F&B people were having a hard time of it.
Last night went OK. There were issues with scheduling and people showing up. I think this is going to be a bigger issues here in DC than most places (with the possible exception of NY).
The transit system here sucks. It closes down at midnight. The follower who is doing costuming missed the last bus and ended up staying at the stop all night. Fortunately they are open until 3 AM on the weekends.
Well its time for me to get ready for work. I will type some more later.