I came in to the church around 11:30AM this morning. I knew with it being Wednesday, that I'd be there late. So, I took part of the morning off and came in later. I literally spent all day working on email and volunteer recruitment. We had a good number of people sign up to join the tech team this past Sunday, so I spent some time looking at my team assignments, trying to place these people where I thought they might fit best, at least to start out, anyway.

It's always hard for me to know where a volunteer would like to serve when the response is generic - "to serve on the audio/visual team". We have so many positions for service. Camera operators, light board operators, sound assistants, camera shaders (control iris and camera functions), video playback, video switcher, slides/lyrics, stage management. When people sign up, I'd like to place them where they have an interest, but sometimes, I need them more in another area. I think everyone that signs up at some point or another wants to run the sound board. The issue with that is it's hard to train on, volunteers get easily frustrated, and they don't know what to do. In short, it's not a good place to start out on without past experience. Maybe it's because I'm not good at training people. I don't know.

My goal today was to identify where we had needs, temporarily assign these new people to those positions, contact them to gauge their interest in serving in that capacity, and going from there. Part of me kept thinking, "They won't want to serve in this area, will think that's the only opportunity for them, and quit." But, I also kept thinking, "The key word here is service. 'Put me where you need me most.'" So that's what I did. I identified my greatest areas of need, and assigned them to those roles. Most of the volunteers replied back to me today and this Sunday will basically be a big training session throughout the morning.

As I was working, a guy stopped by my office to see me. I rarely get visitors. His name was Russ, he attends Southside, and heard the call for needing more tech help, so he decided to stop by. I'm terrible at introducing myself and talking to people for the first time. I just wish I could talk to everyone I meet like we've been friends for life. And sometimes I do talk like that to people I just met. They usually find a way to break away from conversation though and I never see them again. Anyway. I showed Russ around the tech booth and talked about some of my greatest areas of need, and asked him to show up again on Sunday morning to observe and talk some more.

That's one of my tests. If people tell me they want to serve, I talk and then say "Stop by again this Wednesday night or this Sunday" (or some other time). I want to see if they can follow through. I'd rather work with someone who can be reliable and is completely new to technology than someone who knows their trade very well but can't show up on time. I'm really big on the team approach model and everyone working together. If a volunteer is consistently late, we talk, and sometimes I have to "fire" them. It's something I never thought I would be able to do, but have gotten better at over the years.

Russ was a nice guy and we talked for a few minutes and then I went back to work. I worked nonstop and before I realized it, it was 2:45pm. I took a break and worked on a side project. Well, whatever you want to call "spending time on Facebook while at work". A lot of my friends lately have been writing notes and tagging their friends (and me) with a list of "25 random things" that I may not have known about that person. At first when I saw this, it felt very much like all of those annoying email forwards and just annoying-to-read-because-it-just-adds-clutter-to-my-brain things. Do I get a prize for hyphenating that many words together? Guessing my friend Tara would say No. I flat out said, "I will not write this list--read my blog if you want to know about me".

After saying that, I stopped and reconsidered my approach. I had a lot of people tell me that if I wrote the list, they'd read it. So, I thought about it all day and during my break, decided to write it. It was, after all, a neat concept. People could learn some specific details on my life in a short list because most of the things I wanted to mention would never come up in this blog, since, you know, I'm hooked on the whole "this is what I did today" type of writing, not the "get to know your neighborhood Joe in-depth directly" type of writing.

I thought it would be difficult to write 25 things about me but as soon as I got started, I found 25 things to be rather limiting. And I think I did a pretty good job of being funny but serious and inspiring at the same time. Want to see the list? Well, it's on Facebook. Look me up, add me as a friend, and you can read it there. I'm not a proponent of re-displaying content when it is available elsewhere.

I left my office around 3:15pm to go get a quick lunch. I brought some food back and ate in my office. I always shut my door when I'm eating because I hate it when people come in and I'm stuffing my face with food at my desk. Don't judge. You do it too. My office door is always locked. I can't unlock it. I can only turn it with my key to get in, and as soon as I let go of the key, it locks back. Some would call this "broken", but I prefer to call it an enabled anti-theft device. The downside of always having my door locked is that I have to get up and open the door when people knock. And sometimes when people knock and I ignore them, they just keep knocking and knocking. Yeah, that's not annoying.

Around 4:30pm, I had to start setting up for the AWANA Grand Prix. They asked me to set it up so that they could put up a feed from a laptop and then switch over to a camera feed pointed at the end of the track. I didn't really see the point in it, but, I did it for them last year and the year before that so, I didn't really see the point in complaining about it either. It just felt like more work than it was worth to run a cable, bring the entire video system online, turn on the projectors, turn on the worship house lighting system (because you can't see the projector image on the screen with the fluorescent lights on), and set up the switcher to display it.

While I was setting that up with Jay, I called my friend Cheryl, who had apparently tried to call me twice during the day and my phone stayed on silent. I called her back to talk about videotaping a speaking event for her dad. While we were on the phone, I was turning on the dimmer packs for the lighting system. The breakers are upstairs, and usually, I climb the side ladder on the stage as a shortcut. I found it pretty difficult to climb the ladder while also using one hand to hold the phone (without making it sound like I was trying to climb up a ladder), but I did it. Did it without falling. I've fallen off of that stage ladder before too. I'm not going to say how, but, let's just say that I might know exactly how the huge dent in our percussion djembe drum got there. Maybe.

After I was done setting up the stuff for the Grand Prix, another high school student, Matt, stopped by. He asked if there were "any openings" to help out with tech stuff. There are always openings if people feel called to serve. I gave him an overview of the room and then talked a lot about the lighting board setup, an area where I need more volunteers. He seemed interested and mainly wanted to learn about everything, to help wherever was needed most. I love people with that attitude.

Andrew showed up at 6pm to start getting ready for the night. My friend Brian also showed up to hang out with me for a while. We sat in my office and talked for a little bit and then walked around the building some. We took the elevator upstairs. A while ago, I taught Brian my elevator game that I pretty much have everyone in the building hooked on. We played my game on the way up. The elevator has an emergency/panic bell button in it, which I guess is for in case you get stuck or something. If you hold the button down, it engages a hammer which hits a bell until you let up. The game I invented is to try to hit the button so that the hammer only hits the bell one time. One single, "ding!" and nothing else. Two dings or more gets you no points. The goal is to see how many single dings you can get in one elevator trip. My score is 8. Try it sometime and see if you can beat me. But if you ever legitimately get stuck in there and no one comes to your rescue because you kept ringing the bell for fun, well, don't say I didn't tell you so.

Brian and I walked toward the Vapor Cafe to get something to drink out of the soda fridge they have there. Drinks are a dollar but I hardly ever leave any money in there. I figure having me around as an on-call tech support guy is payment enough. We walked over there and were stopped by an accordian-style divider wall, which, I guess is to keep students from wandering around the building when they're supposed to be in the Vapor area. Well, it also keeps thirsty media directors out too. Kind of annoying. We walked all the way around the building to the other side, only to find another locked divider wall. I literally had to walk all the way back to the elevator, go downstairs, walk across the building, go back upstairs, and to the cafe to get a drink. And then walk all the way back downstairs, across the building, and back up to get to where I was before. I sure hope there was never a fire or anything. That'd be even more annoying.

I went down to my office and I saw Ruthie and Jes heading in to my office. I followed them in but I guess they didn't see me. I stood at the door and listened to them as they wrote me a note and took lots of photos on my camera. Probably attempts to get mentioned in "the blog" as people call it. Well, it worked, ladies.



I stood by the door for a while but then just decided to come in to my office to see what they were up to, besides, you know, stealing the money out of my wallet or whatever. I'm big on not having things in my pockets when I don't need them. Part of it is because I've been wearing pants this week that don't have belt loops. It has a drawstring on the inside. That's just dumb. I haven't been able to wear them for a while though so it's cool that they fit now. I guess. Now I don't want to wear them though because of the whole no-belt-loops-thing.



I like that last picture because you can see "Cardboard Art" (a cardboard cutout version of Art Ringger, the executive pastor at Southside, that we used several years ago in a series of short videos to display our progress in the capital campaign to raise money for the new building/facility; the cutout now lives permanently in my office) in the background. A few months ago, I had the idea to put a beer mug in Cardboard Art's right hand. At first, I thought, "Will I get in trouble for this?" but then I thought, "This is too funny to not at least do it and get yelled at for." It is always easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. And the real Art thought it was kinda funny. I think.

Anyway. Brian came in a little bit later and the four of us talked for a few minutes but then I had to head upstairs for the band time at 7:30. We started later tonight because of the Grand Prix using the gym until later.

I set up the sound board and a microphone to record Matt's talk tonight because he asked me to. It meant a lot of walking back and forth from my seat to the board to my seat, which I didn't seem to mind, except I chose a seat in the middle of an aisle, so it annoyed Andrew every time I stood up.

Matt talked tonight about how "artists are crazy" (part of a series) and talked about perfectionism. As worship artists, we tend to get caught up in this cycle of thinking everything has to be perfect, setting expectations too high and then getting disappointed, or thinking it was either all a success or all a failure. I found just discussing perfectionism and action steps to avoid holding ourselves to an unattainable high goal to be encouraging. When Matt was done talking, he opened up the floor for others to share their thoughts. I felt led to share my opinion on my whole perfectionist attitude.

When I first came on staff at Southside, I was a complete perfectionist. Things had to be exactly in their place, and if there was something to be done and I was asked to do it, I tended to back away and not commit to completing it simply out of fear of not being able to do it perfectly (or as well as I had seen it done before, done by a specific person, etc.) Through being forced to do things, being led by people like Matt, and by having opportunities to fail without being harshly judged, I slowly overcame my fear of not executing everything perfectly. Over time, I've seen myself grow in my skillsets by simply allowing myself to try ideas. That attitude has carried over to our tech crew as well. Most of them get and understand that Change is not a bad thing, and it's ok to try ideas. If they don't work, we can go back to what we had before, but it's the trying out new ideas that makes us better at what we can already do. It makes us think and challenge.

We broke from the group time around 8:20. I went downstairs to support the band during the practice, standing around on the stage like I normally do. Most everything worked tonight. I didn't have to do a whole lot except for plug in a few wireless microphones on the input rack at the back of the stage. I took some time tonight to do some light plots while the orchestra was on stage, because it's always so hard to light the orchestra area when there's no one sitting there. Here's to hoping the lights I positioned stay in place until Sunday.

I worked until about 9:30. The band finished practicing kind of early. I shut down the lights, sound system, and all of the video stuff and headed out. Jamie invited me to join him, Mike, Ruthie, and Jes at Barnes and Noble. It sounded like fun, so I headed over there. Jamie and Mike were having a rather serious discussion, so I followed Jes and Ruthie around the store for a bit.

The three of us walked over and sat down at some chairs next to a guy who was reading books. He was one of those kind of readers that mouths each word and whispers it quietly. I kept hearing him read and looking over thinking he was talking to me. I'm sure he was annoyed with all of us sitting there talking loudly. Jamie and Mike joined us after a few minutes and we all sat there and talked for a bit.

As we were sitting, a guy came up and asked if we had any money for a gas can. He started into his story about needing gas for his car that was out of gas down the road, etc. We all kind of abruptly told him, "No". The same guy had come up to Mike last night when we were at Brixx asking for money for a gas can. And Jes said the same guy had come into a restaurant where she was working once three years ago asking for money for a gas can. I figured, "Hey, this guy has been trying to get money for a gas can for three years, maybe we should give him some money". But, I guess that's why people like me get hustled.

Around 10:30pm, Jes abruptly said she had to leave. Ruthie got up to leave too because she didn't want to be the only girl there in our group. I got up to leave too, stating to Jamie and Mike, "You guys are boring". I hope they knew I was kidding, but if not, oh well. They were a little boring. Sorry guys. I followed Ruthie out to the parking lot and then got in my car to leave I saw Jes pulling out and I drove over to say bye. Ruthie was talking to her in the parking lot and I sat there in my car for a while, long enough until I felt like I was just the awkward guy standing to the side of a serious conversation. I do that a lot. I'm bad at sensing when the conversation is going to end. Either that or I have nothing else to do, so I'm just there. I eventually just backed my car up and drove away.

So, anyway. That was my day. I've been meaning to edit the baptism videos all week that we have for Sunday. I just haven't gotten to them yet. I imported the last of the footage today and brought it into the project, but I still have to edit each testimony and make it look good. We'll see how that goes tomorrow, I suppose.

Later,

Joe