The Secret to Effective Disassembly

I have choir practice this morning, so once again, I'll be leaving earlier than usual. I suppose I should get used to that, in case I ever get a real job. When that happens, I'll probably have to switch to blogging in the evening, or whenever I'm not working.

Speaking of working, it took pretty much all day on Thursday to set up the technical equipment for the Sacramento North Stake Youth Conference Roadshow last night, but it only took us about two hours to take it all down afterward. Now, I could turn that into a blog post about how it's easier to tear something down than it is to build it up, but I want to be positive this morning, so instead I'll blog about using your resources, including your talents, wisely.

On Thursday, we were setting up the stage lights by climbing up an A-Frame ladder. It was precarious, it gave us only a small amount of working are at a time, and it essentially just took a long period of time to put the lights up via the ladder. To take the lights down, another part of the technical crew let us use their scissor-lift (at least, that's what they called it), a platform that could be raised and lowered by hydraulics. Using that tool, they were able to take down all the lights at once, without having to move a ladder from light to light.

Since I wasn't on the platform, I was free to help the others with the on-the-ground work. One of the tasks was folding up the projector screens and storing them in bins. Normally, folding the screens is a two-person job, but with my experience folding up tents, I was able to fold up one of the screens on my own, once I had been shown the proper way to fold it. Ryan and I then worked together to get the screens and frames into their bins, after which we worked on taking down and coiling wires. Ryan was more comfortable on a ladder than I was, so he did the actual taking down of the wires, but since I had been taught by my dad the proper way to coil wires, and since I had gain some practice working with ropes recently, I was able to coil all of Ryan's wires correctly as quickly as he could get them down to me.

I may not be good with heights, but I have other talents and abilities that I could bring to the table, and once we were putting them to good use rather than sticking them up a ladder, I was able to help the technical crew more effectively. The moral of the story is that when everyone one the team does the jobs that their best suited for, the whole team works more effectively. Now, this isn't truly a fair comparison, since I think we had more people helping take down than we had when we were setting up, and once again, it's easier to take things down than it is to set things up, but still. I know that without the scissor-lift, taking the lights down would have taken MUCH longer, and that once I was free to do less intimidating work, I was able to get it done quickly. We did pretty darn well last night. But now, I'm kind of looking forward to enjoying a day of rest.