How Doctor Who landed at Sydney's Vivid festival For the last two weeks Sydney, home of The Reg's Vulture South team, has enjoyed the Vivid Festival, a two-week orgy of lights, music and ideas. Kraftwerk headlined and in the past Brian Eno and the Lou Reed/Laurie Anderson team have served as curators. This year a special 50th anniversary Dr Who show saw the Time Lord's …
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Being a tech is a funny job really. We are in the odd (and sometimes frustrating) position that if we do our job well, no one will notice that we have done anything, because things will just work as people expect.
Think about it. You watch a film in a major cinema. Do you think of the people that were involved in running potentially hundreds of miles of cabling through the auditorium to enable the use of lights, speakers, curtain motors (assuming the cinema has curtains)? Do you think of the electricians who wired in the supply to the projector, or the central heating engineers who installed the heating?
You probably don't (and why should you?). Yet if one of the wires should fail, or the heating should go off, you would notice.
Funny you mention that about the electricians and cablers and so forth.
Last time I went to the cinema, as we were walking from the car park to the cinema, I suddenly noticed that the huge building it was housed in was built out of bricks. Not pre-stressed rendered concrete slabs or sheets of galvabond that many large buildings are constructed of these days, but actual bricks. Hundreds of thousands of them.
And I thought, some brickie had to lay all those. Each brick was individually placed and the mortar trowelled over it ready for the next one. I found myself wondering about the men who had put that wall together, how long it must have taken them, and the sense of achievement they must have felt when it was finally completed and they all stood back and looked it over and said, "bloody good job of work, that!" And I wondered how many of the thousands of people who daily walked past that massive edifice of human endeavour had given it a moment's thought.
So here's a beer for all the tradies and techies who do the grunt-work of making civilisation happen all around us, and who we never notice. Bloody good job of work lads!
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