Up On the Roof

Today I started my workday on the roof of the Convention Center. A friend had brought me in to help lower some equipment off the roof.

Over the weekend I had assembled a bag of tricks. I'd been told they were placing a derek and pulley and that they would have a rope, but I didn't want to get up there and not have something I needed. I got myself a rope and some beeners and a figure eight. I pulled rescue sheaves and some slings and spansets, some accessory cord and a half dozen shackles. I even recruited a helper.

When we got there we saw a rig you might associate with scaffolding and bricklayers, not necessarily what you'd choose for moving a PANI projector. We looked over the gear and figured out what we were going to do. We rigged the line to belay from above and added a muling sheave to keep the line from riding into a bind. We tested the rig with one of the lighter loads and were fairly satisfied.

Then we met the building manager, took all of our stuff apart and rerigged it his way.

Without diagrams and a long discussion suffice it to say I listened to what he had to say and even if I thought my way was ultimately safer I decided that his way wasn't patently unsafe and that his saying: "I'm the safety officer for the building" didn't leave me much room to move.

Sometimes I think we over think things. The theatre business doesn't have the same safety standards as other industry. I wasn't fond of the anchor, the connection, the sheave, or the rope, but it was his building and it worked fine. Better to work together and get the gig done as harmoniously as possible as opposed to throwing down over the difference between a 4:1 and a 8:1 design factor (or to risk being called "Poindexter" for even saying "design factor").