Disorganised religion
Feb. 15th, 2026 01:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseWell, church was... interesting this morning. Don't get me wrong, it was a really good service (it always is); this time it was a family service, which means that all the kids stay in rather than going out to their age-related Sunday school groups. That means that you get all-age teaching for most of the service, often in the form of little sketches, games, or quizzes, involving child volunteers; then there's a shorter sermon than usual, more aimed at the adults, and the children get colouring sheets to keep them occupied during this time. And we were looking at John the Baptist; we didn't have any songs that were specifically about him, so some bright spark decided to set some simple words about him to the tune of what is normally a pretty annoying nursery rhyme. I like the John the Baptist version much better, if only because it just has three verses, whereas the nursery rhyme can go on pretty much as long as you can make up verses to fit the template.
However, there did seem to be a higher than usual number of things going wrong. One of them was the weather, to be fair, and there wasn't much anyone could do about that. I don't mind if it's cold, and I don't especially mind if it's raining, but when it's both and there's a fresh wind blowing straight in your face, it's a bit much. But the main thing was the tech. Our tech was really not behaving as it should.
Normally, when this happens, I don't really care. I can project my voice, and the other singer I'm usually on with can do the same. But I was coming in with the tag end of that cold, and so I wasn't going to be doing any major projecting, and Bev (the other singer) didn't really know two of the songs, so we needed the mikes to be working. One or two of the music group mucked about with them a bit, but to no avail; some of the tech was working, but not all of it, and definitely not the mikes.
Again, normally, that's not a problem, because whoever's in charge of tech comes and fixes it. Unfortunately, the person who was on the rota to do the tech today was not only not there, but uncontactable. We have a few people who do it, and the bloke in overall charge is called Rich; if he'd been on duty this morning it would all have been fine, but he wasn't. (Thankfully, the missing tech person turned out to be all right in the end. He'd just had some kind of emergency, and the mobile reception here is notoriously bad, so I wasn't entirely surprised he couldn't be reached.)
So... we had to get Rich, quick. And no, I'm not going to apologise for the pun. :-D
It took even Rich a little while to sort out whatever was wrong; he asked me to talk into my mike, and I got through almost the entirety of the Jabberwocky before he fixed it. But he did, and all was fine in the end. Phew. (We will not talk about the fact that the final song, which neither Bev nor I knew very well, was played as written in the practice and then quite differently when we actually sang it in the service; Bev doesn't follow the music so she just went with the flow, but I do, and so I got totally lost. Such things happen from time to time.)
Well... I think I'd be a bit worried about a church that ran like clockwork all the time!
However, there did seem to be a higher than usual number of things going wrong. One of them was the weather, to be fair, and there wasn't much anyone could do about that. I don't mind if it's cold, and I don't especially mind if it's raining, but when it's both and there's a fresh wind blowing straight in your face, it's a bit much. But the main thing was the tech. Our tech was really not behaving as it should.
Normally, when this happens, I don't really care. I can project my voice, and the other singer I'm usually on with can do the same. But I was coming in with the tag end of that cold, and so I wasn't going to be doing any major projecting, and Bev (the other singer) didn't really know two of the songs, so we needed the mikes to be working. One or two of the music group mucked about with them a bit, but to no avail; some of the tech was working, but not all of it, and definitely not the mikes.
Again, normally, that's not a problem, because whoever's in charge of tech comes and fixes it. Unfortunately, the person who was on the rota to do the tech today was not only not there, but uncontactable. We have a few people who do it, and the bloke in overall charge is called Rich; if he'd been on duty this morning it would all have been fine, but he wasn't. (Thankfully, the missing tech person turned out to be all right in the end. He'd just had some kind of emergency, and the mobile reception here is notoriously bad, so I wasn't entirely surprised he couldn't be reached.)
So... we had to get Rich, quick. And no, I'm not going to apologise for the pun. :-D
It took even Rich a little while to sort out whatever was wrong; he asked me to talk into my mike, and I got through almost the entirety of the Jabberwocky before he fixed it. But he did, and all was fine in the end. Phew. (We will not talk about the fact that the final song, which neither Bev nor I knew very well, was played as written in the practice and then quite differently when we actually sang it in the service; Bev doesn't follow the music so she just went with the flow, but I do, and so I got totally lost. Such things happen from time to time.)
Well... I think I'd be a bit worried about a church that ran like clockwork all the time!
