That was unexpected

I had the most ridiculous day yesterday. I've bitched before about working on clusterfuck jobs, with people who didn't have a clue, but this one was taken to a new level. All I knew is that we were going to be focusing some lights. I knew it was at a mall or something. I knew it paid many dollars per hour. So I gathered my toolbag, my snacks and my bottle of water, and considered myself as ready as I was going to be, and waited for Alex to pick me up.

We drove to the area where Nebraska Furniture Mart is, an area I have never been to before in my life. It's also where that Great Wolf Lodge is that I've heard commercials for on the radio, but nevertheless felt no real need to "answer the call" and actually go to. Looks like your basic suburban monstrosity. It turns out that we're focusing the lights for a restaurant opening next month called T-Rex. Guess what that means? You're right! Huge animatronic dinosaurs. Outside is a gigantic fake dino skeleton, and fake rocks are everywhere. There are tons and tons of things hanging from the ceiling, lots of painted walls. It looks a lot like being inside an aquarium, actually.

This restaturant/shopping experience isn't done at all, and it looks like parts that were done were chopped open again to work on something else. Baasically, construction everywhere. We meet the guy who we're supposedly working for, and within moments we can tell he has no clue. He just isn't "in charge" of anything. He spent half an hour telling us what each area was going to look like, which ones would have pyro, what the themes were. All completely irrelevant. More than half of the lights we're going to "focus" are architectural fixtures of some kind. Most of the stuff to focus the lights on isn't even there yet. He actually sent us outside (in the hot) to blind point some lights at stuff out there. The lights weren't even ON and the sun WAS, so this was a completely pointless waste of time.

There are actual construction people all over the place, and we're told we should be wearing hard hats, which had to be hunted down. The guy didn't seem to know how to get the lights turned on. Another guy showed up who hooked up some kind of lighting control, and we finally got some lights on. By that time, most of the construction people were gone so we could get some lifts, but in order to go up in a lift we had to get harnesses on. I rode in a genie boom lift, which has about a hundred switches to steer the damn thing. I drove a genie scissors lift myself, and that's also pretty tricky. At one point a construction guy told Alex, who was wearing shorts, that he would have to wear pants tomorrow, or all the guys are going to want to wear shorts. We had no clue we'd even be on a damn fool construction site! I spent the last several hours next to the dimmer rack with a walkie talkie, turning them on one at a time so Mr. Idiot could try to see if the lights worked. I won't even go into the "paperwork" we're using.

We were there from noon to 9:30, and in the end, we focused maybe 8 lights. We spent huge amounts of time waiting around. I can't believe we're being paid to stand around like this. I came home grubby and exhausted. I was just glad to be somewhere quiet and clean.