Gimmie Gimmie Roar!

Another behind the scenes posting today (not many more left now!) and this week - as the title suggests - is ROAR, the replacement for the previous regular Wednesday club night Juice. Those who are old enough to remember Juice are always a bit nostalgic about Juice and often somewhat resent Roar for taking it's place. I am one of those people but Juice held an even more special place in my heart because it was one of my first nights out in Sheffield.

This evening was by far the most laid back of all of the events that I have worked, so much so that despite starting an hour later than we were supposed to (for reasons I will come to later) we were still finished in plenty of time and that was with a crew of only two seniors to four juniors, two who were filling technical positions!

The rest of the day I had been in the lab, working on this blasted spider and then we were treated to another training session, this time for a live band / DJ set up in the Fusion. Deciding it would be a good idea to train us for the unexpected, they decided to plan the most elaborate and complicated setup imaginable, and then split us into three groups to learn about the equipment. After about five minutes of gathering the equipment from the other room however, the fire alarm went off - and it wasn't a drill. We spend what seemed like about an hour although in reality was more like 35 - 40 minutes outside before we were let back in again (earlier than the rest of the students because we are classed as staff!). What was even weirder about the whole thing was that there was an open day happening in the other room and all of the prospective students were quite happily drinking tea and eating biscuits before they were thrown into chaos by the alarm. They didn't seem to come back either so goodness knows what happened to them.

The training also got off to a bad start because the first thing we were asked to do was to collect a load of equipment that we would need for the setup, most of it that we had never used or even heard of before and yet we were supposed to be getting all of the necessary cables to go with it. A bit of guesswork and some logic came into play and I think we got away with it because no complaints of missing cables came back. This session was supposed to be a lot shorter than the previous session which only lasted about two hours so I was expecting to be there no longer than that. Three hours later however, and the session was still going. Two members of our group had to go home due to other commitments as they were expecting a similar time scale to me, I was supposed to be starting the set up in the other room at six o'clock and I still hadn't had lunch after the sandwich van decided to leave early and I had to rush to make the training session in time. We got a little bit carried away in the lab - programming can have that effect at times - and so I was late leaving, hence the rush.

Training done, the stage manager decided to give us the rest of the hour as a break and so we would start at 7pm instead. A trip to the local take-away outlet and some chips later, I was ready to start work. A couple of hours later, we were done and it was time for yet more food and more chips. What a healthy lifestyle they promote! As for the event itself, it turns out that the only difference between Roar and Juice is that the DJs swapped rooms. Also, two TSC members were no longer working, one had turned up for the hell of it and the other was only working the first half anyway and so we ended up in the Juice room as it shall now be known, dancing the night away to all of the wonderful old school music that we grew up with.

Training + working + dancing + more work + bouldering the night before meant that by the time I got home I was absolutely shattered and my body aching from head to toe. Needless to say I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow.