A friend of mine told me recently, that much as he loves his job, he can't help but get a sort of "oh-no-here-we-go-again" feeling of dread every time he pulls up to a venue and sees a group of the local stage hands waiting for direction.  I have never had this reaction so his comment got me thinking.

For a couple years now I have been cautiously toying with the idea that maybe (knock on wood) I have good "hand karma."  I keep going to venues where I've been warned about the hands; their lack of experience, their  incredibly slow work speed, their universal resemblance to characters in Deliverance, and yet I keep finding the exact opposite.  My hands are almost always knowledgeable, cheerfully willing to work, and, bonus,  they've all got their own teeth.  I was having a hard time figuring out where the disparity between my experiences and other people's experiences came in.  The best I can come up with to explain it is just plain old perception. 

I'm fairly new at all this, I don't have years and years and years of loading in venues around the country.  I haven't been completely screwed yet (knocking on wood again).  I, for example, haven't had to disappoint a client because my stagehands got drunk, ran the data cable backwards, and left the venue three hours too early, as happened to another friend of mine recently. I come in thinking the stagehands are gonna be great and that's what I get.  Or at least, that's what I perceive I get.

I'm pretty sure this theory is correct based on the times I have loaded in with several M.E.'s and L.D.'s all on the same gig.  By the end of the first hour I am feeling great, I've picked out the team of the best hands, that are my "go-to" guys/girls and I'm confident that everything I'm asking for is being done the way I want it done.  The guys I came out on the gig with are usually the exact opposite.  By the end of the hour they've discovered the greenest, and drunkest of the hands and have had to go back and redo at least five or six things that were done wrong ( in spite of all the best labeling and the clearest instructions).  Now that is not to say that later on I don't discover things done wrong and don't spend precious time fixing things I thought I explained clearly enough for a two year old to follow.  I do.  All the time I do.  Here's some of the best of the worst.

I'm constantly amazed that my hands work as hard as they do.  In my opinion no one gets paid enough to put up with the amount of disorganization, physical labor, and abuse that come along with at least the big corporate gigs and the one offs.  Especially when you consider that there is no extra reward for being the smart, hard working hand.  Its not like you get paid more.  Your "reward" is usually just having to work harder because people like me see that you have a clue and can be counted on, so any time there's something tough to do, I pick you to do it.  The lazy hand stays behind and smokes while the smart, hardworking guy climbs rain soaked truss, runs cable through a cactus patch, or pulls miles of fiber optic out of crawl spaces so tiny they would give rats claustrophobia.  The only reason to work that hard is because they care.  Whether they care about the job that's being done, or care about their own work ethic, or even just care about learning new things and getting a good workout, it doesn't make any difference.  The point is, they care.   I respect people that care.  I respect people that bust ass because they care.

Since I'm focused on the good ones, that's how I remember the hands as a whole, a pretty decent bunch of knowledgeable, hardworking people.  Once the last box goes on the truck I'm always really thankful to this group of relative strangers who jumped in and helped me pull off a gig that made me a lot more money than it made them, who stayed through to the bitter end, who remained cheerful and helpful even when the client changed their minds on site and made us re-run 550 feet of feeder four times (ok I exaggerate a little, you'll learn that about me if you read just about anything I write).  "These," I say to myself, "are good people."  And that, I think, explains my "Good Hand " karma.