Behind the Scenes at Space

For those of you reading this that are not familiar with the events of the University of Sheffield's Student's Union then I should probably make this clear first otherwise the rest of this post is unlikely to make sense to you. Space is the name of one of the events that occurs regularly on a Friday night (during term time). With that cleared up, I shall continue. Tonight is the first event that I have worked as part of the TSC. My initial thoughts were that perhaps I was being a little too ambitious starting with such a large event and that I should probably have gone for something smaller as a break in. I have since changed my mind and I am now very grateful that I did choose this event as my first. Apparently this is one of two events where you learn the most and I certainly feel like my brain has had its share of new knowledge for the week, let alone one evening.

What with remembering names of people, equipment cables and the like - being a techie committee, the names of common things are abbreviated or just changed to confuse outsiders - and then remembering what jobs there are to do it was all very intense. Thankfully, it is also fairly laid back at the same time and because they have been doing this for such a long time, there was plenty of time to teach the two newbies what to do. The other interesting part of the night was exploring all of the back corridors that exist for the crew to use during the evening. It is like being in a secret society using secret passages to start with, but I'm sure the novelty will wear off after a while. It is nice to see what is really behind those doors marked 'Authorised Personnel Only'.

It is going to take some time to get used to all of the heavy lifting though. Just about the only exercise I get in life is walking and that is only as a means of transport to and from university and lectures rather than any sort of intense exercise. I never realised just how heavy things were before but now I appreciate just how much work goes into everything. After arriving at 16:00 when the event starts at 23:00 I was wondering what all the time was going to be for. I now know that most of it is used and there is only about an hour left as a reserve for when things go horribly wrong. During the event, not much goes on but thankfully I had brought my laptop and managed to get a little bit of work done.

After the event has finished, we spring back into life - now fuelled by sugar and caffeine alone we have to take down and put away all the stuff we spent hours putting up. Thankfully this doesn't take such a long time but I didn't get home until 05:30 so a very very long day indeed.