The Pack is an expression that gets used by stagehands in referring to how scenery/equipment/road-boxes/whatever gets put in a truck... The Pack is something that at times is a very serious matter... Touring shows are the most serious about it as they want to get the most stuff in a truck as possible, without damaging it, and keeping it in the right order to come off the truck... In many theatres, you either don't have room to take everything off the truck at once before its set up, or the theatre simply can't take that much stuff for a show... So the shows are typically designed with the ability to downsize them... What that means is you had better figure out The Pack... There is no perfect Pack... It's an unachievable goal, but you can get close... For the big shows that we do, that involve cross country trucking, I typically draw all the stacks of scenery, and road-cases in three dimensions, and place them in a three dimensional truck box I have drawn... That gives us a good start, and lets us determine just how much truck we will need... Some people have an almost spooky ability to pack a truck by eye, almost perfectly, keeping everything locked in place by everything else... I typically can pull that off, but I'm certainly not perfect...
The thing that brought this to mind, was an attempted lumber delivery today... If you were paying attention right there, you noticed the word attempted... At around 11am today, the lumber guy showed up... Now I don't have a regular lumber delivery guy, I get whoever happens to end up with my load on their truck/van... For the most part, the guys are decent... I mean they do this for a living, and they don't want to have a miserable day, so they usually pay attention to their Pack... When the doors opened on the van today, there was my stack of luan, right at the bottom of the pile... There was no chance in hell I was shifting all that crap for the delivery guy... I sent him off to do his other runs, hoping that he'd be back before the end of the day... No such luck... That means I'll have to wait half the day at least Monday since my stack will again be at the bottom of the pile...
All he had to do was look in the back of the van before he left the yard... Idiot...
Posted by Backstage at December 9, 2005 07:57 PM | TrackBack