Last night's job was one fraught with problems. First, the job was contracted to being at 5:30, however, the lady that hired me changed the time to 5:00. The only person she forgot to pass this information along to was me. Consequently, I arrived at 4:40 to set up and quickly discovered the hall was filled with people. After a quick setup, the van was parked and I fired up the system. For the first hour and a half, it was cocktails, then dinner, during which time I played soft, Christmas, background music.

Piece of cake--at least until I then found out that there would be a performance by the residents of the Assisted Living Center who were bussed to the party. 25 chairs were lined up in front of me and the residents were placed in the chairs, each with a six-song lyrics sheet in hand. Still not a big deal for me, at least until the guy that owns the center wanted to make a speach. He asked to borrow my mic, which is the reason I have a spare, inexpensive hand-held mic with me at all times. He made his speech, which took another 15 minutes, then sang songs for 45 minutes, and at this point I only had 25 minutes left to perform.

When I switched on my wireless mic, some awful static came over the system, which I quickly squelched by turning off the volume. I then put on an MP3 file to play while trying to diagnose the problem. I plugged a small headset into the wireless reciever and heard "Do you want fries with that." Wonderful, a fast-food eatery just down the street was on the same freqency as my wireless system.

Undaunted, I plugged in my trusty mic cable, bypassing the wireless system. For the first time in years I had a mic cable go bad, probaly because the guy giving the speech was standing on it the entire time he was talking and shuffling his feet a bit. I then opened my little bag of spare parts, plugged in the spare mic cable and finished the remainder of the job.

Today, it's off on another job, however, I'm leaving a bit earlier than usual so I can stop at the local music store and pick up another spare mic cable--you just never know!

Merry Christmas everyone,

Gary