This was not so much of a nightmare as it was a huge pain in my ass — someone else decided I was young and “must know nothing,” and so when they looked bad because they didn’t listen to me, well, it was still all my fault.
I was doing a little doctor meeting. It was easy — there were a few speakers, followed by a Q&A session at the end. On the first day, I told the head mic runner, who was with the production company, how I wanted the mics to be scattered in the room. She looked at me like I was nuts and laughed. After the first Q&A session went OK, she smugly handed the mics back to me. Whatever. Time for questions again — she makes a smart-ass comment about how she is going to have the mics in her hand, house left. I brushed it off.
The Q&A went fine, and now she thinks she should be running the board.
Come day two. Same meeting, different crowd. I again try to get this lady to have mics in a certain part of the room, to no avail. So what happens? A huge squeal of feedback slices through the room. I can’t find it right away, so everything gets turned down. I start raising faders and find the feedback. Lo and behold, it’s because one of her mic runners is aiming a mic right into a speaker — the same mic that should have been house left, not all the way house right. I was pissed.
Of course, the lady is mad, too, and wants to know why that happened. I bit my tongue. The rest of the show went fine, but that feedback (and the head mic runner) really got my back up. Maybe if I had let the room ring until I physically put all the mics where I wanted them to be, things would have been different.
Brian Crowley
Chicago, IL
