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Topic: I broke a violin at work today
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Michael Schaffer
"Where is the
Boardwalk Hotel?"
Posts: 4143
From: Boston, MA
Registered: Apr 2002
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posted 09-16-2003 06:08 AM
During my time at music college, we had a concert in the local opera theatre. I mean a symphony concert where the orchestra is on the stage, not an opera performance where the orchestra is in the pit.
Anyway, a theatre has an iron curtain which is supposed to come down in the event of fire to seperate the auditorium from the stage house. There is a white line across the stage where the iron curtain will make contact with the floor.
Fire code in Germany requires that the iron curtain is tested before every performance. So they made an announcement that the iron curtain would be tested now, and please don`t leave anything on the white line.
Sure enough, one of my classmates left his double bass lying on the floor with the neck across the white line, haha!!!
Actually, the instrument belonged to the school. The neck and fingerboard were completely shattered, and the corpus was basically "intact", but there were so many fractures across the wood that it was impossible to repair it.
So the decapitated bass sat in the corner in a room. We asked our professor if we could throw it out of a window from the 3rd floor, just to see what it looks like when a bass flies out of the window.
Somehow, he never warmed to the idea though.
Even better was when they started renovating the ground floor of the school.
They had to move the pianos to the first floor, so the school bought a device which looked like a little tank with flexible tracks and a flat top. The pianos - actually grand pianos - were tied to the flat top, upright on the left side which is not curved.
The tank thing was supposed to be able to climb stairs on the tracks, and it was controlled with a remote on a wire.
One of the piano professors was so excited about the new machine that he insisted on piloting it himself.
It was really quite high tech. Unfortunately, our stairs were really old and low tech (one of the reasons they wanted to reconstruct the place), so one of the steps collapsed under the weight and sent the tank with the grand piano on it down the stairs, burying the teacher under the piano.
He had one leg broken, and the tank was completely messed up. So they trashed it and rented some big guys from a moving company to schlepp the pianos upstairs.
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Evans A Criswell
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1579
From: Huntsville, AL, USA
Registered: Mar 2000
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posted 09-17-2003 09:46 AM
John! Your post about the violin makes me think of one thing: Inspector Clouseau stepping on the violin in one of the Pink Panther movies!
As for breaking things -- I can't remember breaking anything at work. I think I may have done some damage to a copy machine once by pressing too hard on the top that you have to put down over a book that you're copying. It started making some loud noises when copying and the copy quality was terrible afterwards.
In Fall 1980, when I started taking 16mm projectors to classes and setting them up for teachers before school each day in the 7th grade, the first projector I took on the first day jammed on me very badly. It was a Bell and Howell autoload, so I fed the film exactly as I was supposed to and waited for it to come out the other end. It didn't and putting the projector in reverse just pulled the film in further! The projector had to be partially disassembled to get that mess out of there. Fortunately, this little disaster I had on the first day of doing that was the worst I ever had in the two school years (7th and 8th grade) that I did that.
I may have hosed up a SCSI hard drive once. We had an SGI Indy that we got in late 1993 or early 1994, I beleive, and I hooked an external SCSI device to it, forgetting to set the SCSI ID on it. It was the same as the SCSI ID of the internal hard drive. fsck totally hosed the filesystem on the internal hard drive and I had to reinstall IRIX (their UNIX version). After reinstalling, I noticed messages about bad blocks in the system log. I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't due to the accident. We had a full maintenance contract on the machine, so SGI came and put a new drive in it when I reported the bad blocks in the syslog. We paid a lot of money for that type of maintenance and eveidentally, replacing hard drives and motherboards in machines were ordinary routine things for them.
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