Don't want to fall behind - Sunday

I woke up this morning because that is what I usually do after I've been asleep. Even although it's morning and I normally post at night I thought I better post now as the chances are I'll forget most of what I know by tonight.

On Sunday I was at church which is possibly unsurprising. It felt like a much shorter day at church than normal. I've been asked to describe what I do at church a bit more. For those of you who go to my church just skip this whole bit. As usual there was the 1st service from 10am until 11am at which point I have to immediately set up for the all age service and make sure everything's working, the laptop is plugged in to all the right places, all the correct screens and mics are working etc. While I was busy doing that Donald walked past and pressed the button for the pre-service lights which saved me a job. We also have to replace the batteries for all the mic packs every Sunday morning even when you know that a mic pack hasn't been used all week and the battery was brand new last Sunday morning... what a waste of £1. That's ten 10p packets of crisps! Speaking of crisps, I was bad over the weekend after I started eating those American crisps I may have mentioned in a previous post. Donald confiscated them because he wasn't convinced by my argument that I was sticking to one packet per day was still being entirely healthy given that they were ten ounce (280g) packets.

Anyway, back to church... I have mediashout pre-programmed so that once I set it up at 11am i don't really need to do anything with it until 11:25 which means I can check the rest of the script, that all the correct people have radio mics and all other mics are in the right places and working. I've given up on the singers mics being in the right places. I just work out which mic belongs to which singer now. Often a speaker will arrive with a Powerpoint to be inserted into Mediashout but I already had the speakers powerpoint on Sunday as Donald was speaking. Recently there's been some 'minor glitches' with a corruption in the programming which controls the sound/video/lighting hardware so we'd had a few unexpected things happening during services. Thankfully this had been repaired by this week and identified as having been caused by someone smashing a light control panel outside the main hall.

At 11:25 I put the 5min countdown on and at 11:27 put the main screen on to that. Up until that point the main screen has been running the notices for the upcoming week whilst all the other screens are displaying other information, running notices, welcoming people and playing worship videos. That's all done through mediashout. It's programmed to play worship tracks in the background of anything other than a music video as well so that we have lovely music constantly playing in the background as people drink their tea and coffee.

Once 11:30 hits that means that I need to try to concentrate for the next hour and multi-task. Why do men normally do tech when it requires so much multi-tasking which is something that most men aren't blessed with and most women are? Maybe I'm just biased because I like women more than I like men.

After the service ends at about 12:35 I let the script that I've pre-programmed in advance run again knowing that the hours I've spent meticulously timing it (or the 2 mins I've spent dragging notices and worship videos in) means that I can go off and speak to my friends. Gradually numbers decrease and eventually about 2pm I drag myself upstairs for lunch, making sure I bring along any fellow stragglers. On Sunday I was very good and had a small bowl of lentil soup and half a baked potato with nothing on it... just a pity I'm not more consistant when there's a packet of crisps to tempt me.

After lunch I socialised with Stephen, Laura, Stuart etc given the absense of any better company and then at 4:30pm (I think) went to a planning meeting for our next Christianity Explored course. After that was finished I went downstairs to finish programming the mediashout script for the evening service which also involved typing out a couple of very long songs from a hymn book (a hymn book is a pre-21st century thing that people used to use before they invented computers) because some of the hymns the chairman had chosen hadn't been sung at church in so long that they hadn't made it into the database yet. It's worth mentioning that I'm meant to be given the songs no later than Tuesday night but I'd just been given these on Sunday afternoon. It just so happened I had nothing better to do this Sunday but most of the time I have far more enjoyable things to be doing than sitting on my own in front of a computer... oh wait, that's what I'm doing now... but not out of choice.

Come 6:30 and it's time for the evening service where I had to do my usual thing. It'd be nice not to have to do it for every service every week so we really need people to get trained up so that I can have a break. Normally Fraser would be taking a turn but unfortunately he has to be drumming the whole time as we're short of at least one drummer right now.

After that there was only a small group of young people as Direction's been cancelled for the summer so we went to Luca's where certain people had a discussion about the role of women in the church and then I went home and can't remember what I did after that but it probably wasn't sleeping as I'm back in 2 hour per night sleep mode this week.