no worries, we do it all the time

so it was my first real gig as production manager. because i paid attention to the farns, i knew i needed to be sure that our hazer (like a smoke machine, but better) wouldn't set off the church's fire alarms. one of the first things i said to the church people was, "is there a fire alarm system that we need to disable while we run our hazer?" their answer was, "no worries, we run a smoke machine all the time"..... i'm sure you can guess what happened.


yep, the fire alarm went off, and the fire department showed up. but it didn't happen early in the day while we were setting up, or during soundcheck.... it went off 10 minutes after we opened doors so that everyone was already in the building and we had to explain what was happening to the audience... and delay the show. but anthony got to meet the firemen.

we called the alarm company to try and get them to turn the alarm off and they put us on hold... we called about our fire alarm going off and they put us on hold............... really?!?! so while we were on hold, we started brainstorming other options. here's the church's first idea.


well, after about 30 minutes of the alarm going off, we finally got it to turn off. as soon as they assured me that there was no way the alarm would go off again, we turned the hazer back on got the show started - only 18 minutes late.


thanks to travis honeycutt for making this church look great with very little gear. unfortunately, there was a guy in the audience who didn't agree. for the first time ever... the lighting guy got a complaint and not the sound guy. that's right - some old man came to front of house and whined about the light being in his eyes and no one came to the sound board to complain. some people even complimented me on the mix. it's really just cause i couldn't mix very loud. apparently people like it when the volume doesn't ever get louder than 95dB. i'll keep that in mind.