First post on MY A/V Life

Today was the first day of my transition from one position to another in a small business.

Let me give you some background.

I used to be the production manager/ project manager for one of the larger custom Audio Video automation contractors in the country. My boss and I never saw eye to eye. In my opinion, I was seen as an obstacle. I saw it as the voice of reason. We can’t say yes to everyone every time. Needless to say, we butted heads quite a bit. He wanted what he wanted, and I didn’t always think what he wanted was possible. Anyway, a lot of what I did with my day to day was put out fires. This architect changes this, this client changes that, my boss changes something else. It was a grind. Every day, on guard, constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. When I was good, I caught them, most of them anyway. Four years of being the only one in charge of every project took its toll. The problem with putting out fires or catching shoes is if you aren’t on 24/7, 365 you get burnt, or hit with a shoe. I did, plenty of times.

Four years of this, plus long hours every day wears a person out. Calls in the evening, calls on holidays, calls on the weekends, you never realty get a chance to rest. You get dull, slow, miss a step, miss a detail here and there or worse. Walk into doors, forget what you were saying mid-sentence good times.

Then there are the layoffs. You start with a team, a team you trust. They might not be the best according to others, but they’re the team you trust and you get it done. As the economy gets worse, your team gets smaller and you take on more and more.

What you just read is a recipe for disaster.

A smaller team and working harder and harder leaves you scrambling on your good days and overwhelmed on your bad. My disaster came in the form of MRSA. Probably not what you thought I was going to say, I would imagine. I certainly didn’t see it coming.

The Thursday before the Super Bowl this year, I was scrambling, like usual, because the Super Bowl is a day that everyone who never uses their TV or theater decides “Time for an upgrade!” except they think this on the Wednesday before the Super Bowl. Not a ton of time, especially when everyone has the same thought. Anyway, I was in our warehouse and happened to catch my jeans on something. I never thought twice about it, except the next day I didn’t feel great and had “a pimple”. Saturday, a pretty quiet day, left me pretty tired and not feeling right. I was kind of achey, really tired and a low grade fever came over me, and that “pimple” got bigger. Something told me this wasn’t right. One of the guys that worked for me at the time had a very similar pimple and it turned out to be Staph. Nah, not me. I was just a little burnt out. This happened from time to time, minus the fever. “I’m just burnt out and it was catching up”, I told myself. Sunday “the pimple” was too big to ignore anymore and my fever was 101. I missed the Super Bowl unlike my clients who had their new TV’s and projectors. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

The next three weeks are pretty much a blur. Doctors visits, hospitalization, emergency surgery, visiting nurses at home, sleep and more sleep. My life got pretty turned around on what, I thought at that moment, was a pimple.

With all that being said, a lot of fires got some fuel they wouldn’t normally and a lot of shoes fell all over the ground that might have been caughtwhile I was gone. If I’m not there, no one is really looking, and it all came apart at the seams. The plus in all this, was that everyone realized how hard I was working. The negative was everyone realized, including me, that the pace wouldn’t last.

Coming back from all of this, there was a sitdown conversation with my boss and his wife. Probably the best conversation we’ve had since I started. He wasn’t happy. I was miserable. He didn’t like how things were going, neither did I. I thought about quitting and I told him. We ripped a bunch of band aids off and it felt pretty good. The out come was this. I got offered a new position in the company. “ Write your own position” they said. “We want you to be involved in sales”, which coincidentally was something I pondered while I was home recovering. I also got told that my old position wasn’t up for discussion. “We’ve farmed it out to a few people throughout the company”. As of this writing, four people do parts of my old job. “Rest and relax and think about what you want to do. Do you want to stay? Do you want to come up with a new position? Do you want to go someplace else and try something new? Take the rest of the week and come back to us and let us know what you think.” And I did. I talked to friends, close friends, I talked to family, I talked to my significant other, I talked to paid professionals who I trust implicitly, and I decided to make up my own new job.

Today was my first day back on the job. It didn’t start perfectly. My alarm code was changed while I was gone, so I had an interesting 5 minutes when I walked in. My boss and his wife forgot I was coming in, so the day was pretty quiet overall. Everyone was glad to see me, there was a lot of love in the office. Overall, there isn’t much else to say other than tomorrow I’ll sit down and hash out my position and what it is.

This blog is going to be about my experiences making a pretty serious transition in a pretty small business. The ups, the downs, and everything in the middle. If there isn’t much to report for whatever reason, you might find out what I think about some of the newest products in Home Entertainment or Audio Video. You may read about what music has been on at home with friends or in the car on the way to and from work. Basically, you’re going to come along with me on my A/V life. I hope you enjoy it, I’m going to sure as hell try to.