So last Friday night I was working at the unique venue of a watermill to carry out a disco for a 50th Birthday Party.
As we carried all the equipment into the room where we were meant to be working, this happened to be up two flights of stairs so temporarily made me feel drained to combat this I gave myself two minutes just to catch my breath so this was not an issue.
What did turn out to be an issue was that I did not anticipate the area we were working in to have the lowered ceiling that it did, to my annoyance this meant that we would not be able to fit our overhead bars for lighting as we usually did this immediately got me thinking "Where am I going to put the lights?"
Feeling a bit cagey as we only had a short amount setup time left I started to look at ways to combat the issue, now I remember seeing a
YouTube video a few years back on how to mount lights to speaker stands using a clamp called an O-Clamp. Now I remember seeing some of these in the bottom of one of my many cases, so searched them out and low and behold they fitted to the speaker stands to allow me to mount lights there.
Now in hindsight I should have probably done better research regarding the venue in advance this meaning I could have known about the ceiling before arrival and been able to pre-install the clamps saving me both time and stress. This being said I did still manage to problem solve at the time and the overall job was a success so I am pleased with myself for being able to do that.
Moving forward I am going to look into details about venues I am due to be working at prior to each job even if this involved a site visit a few weeks before the job just so I can better prepare myself for these situations. Also to avoid me getting stressed about the lack of time available to me I will leave a few extra minutes earlier than I usually would just to better prepare.
I believe I can relate the experience to Kolb's Learning cycle as:
I experienced an issue > On reflecting I looked back over the experience > This enabled me to think of what I could have done better > Allowing me to plan what I can do in future jobs to avoid the issue.