The Work Day From Hell

Who hasn’t had “one of those days” at work?  Usually they don’t involve embarrassing yourself in front of somebody famous, but that’s one of the risks in this risky business.  I can’t recall when I’ve last achieved this kind of hideous stupidity. The closest I’ve come was when Sally Field asked me if she could borrow my heat gun to dry her hair, which was in curlers.  She was obviously (to anyone looking on who had a functioning brain) joking, but I handed it over to her muttering this advice: “Watch out, it’s set at 700 degrees.”

Two days ago was the work day from hell for me.  It began with a list of many small paint tasks which put me on a course far outside the orbit of the immediate shooting crew.  I was on the outskirts of a water treatment plant aging various signs we had placed or replaced, and I was listening in to the shooting crew, who were inside the confines of the treatment plant’s main building, which was guarded by a phalanx of PA’s instructed to stop anyone from entering and interrupting the rehearsals or shooting.

Normally I would have been inside there with the rest of them, ready to step in and take the glare off something with dulling spray, or, most importantly, to reset the dry erase writing that Harrison Ford was jotting down on a white board and continuing onto the adjacent wall as part of an important scene’s action.  That was supposed to be my main job that day: erasing Ford’s writing between takes so he could write on a blank wall for the next take.

And I was very excited and happy about this job, because it was an important job, part of continuity, and it was an authentic standby painter’s task.  I had special dry erase board wipes on hand, solvents to clean the wall, and even wall paint supplied by the water treatment manager from their own stash so it would exactly match.  I had this little mini-kit all ready and standing by next to the inner sanctum, along with spare dry erase markers for Harrison if his needed replacing.

But then the signage tasks were assigned by my art director and they had to be completed at once, and sometime during the farthest sign away from the set, across a huge parking lot and up a hill, I got the call to come in to set.  I answered that I’d be in right away, and half-walked, half-ran with my other kit bag (that weighs twenty or possibly fifty pounds), which imbued me with a humping, limping lope more suited to a lumbering primate than a working woman in a hurry, and reached the door listening to the calls to me go out with increasing intensity and eventually irritation even when I answered them.

I realized eventually that nobody could hear me.  Nobody.  I once again had a faulty microphone on my headset (By the way, don’t ever order something called “The Director’s Special” radio headset from a certain online electronics store—it is total crap and will FAIL after less than two weeks of use).

I finally limp-lumbered up to the PA’s guarding the doors to the building, but they were new on the show that week, and wouldn’t betray their masters’ orders and let me in because they didn’t know I was on the crew since I looked like a crazy, out of breath, paint-covered homeless person, and not a professional film person.

I limped around the rear of the building, heading for the back door, which was only another half mile further, tearing off my headset and talking into the radio to say I was coming, but even though they might have heard me, there was no answer.  They had moved on to the take where Harrison Ford is writing on the wall—without me.  Okay, that was really bad, to be the standby painter and not be standing by.  But the situation was still salvageable.  I thought.

I waited until Ford had finished his first bout of writing and they called “CUT!,” and then I slipped inside to find an almost impenetrable mass of people moving lights, cables, cameras, dollies, and set dressing.  As usual, everyone was in a hurry, near panic in their desperation to get their particular job done before the camera was set up to go again—just like me.  I spotted Harrison in the center of it all and joined him as he was walking back to the dry erase board.

“Do you need the writing erased?”  I asked.  Harrison looked at me and seemed pleased that someone had shown up to do this.

“Why yes, I do.  I’ve been doing it.”

“Well, let me do it for you.” I offered.

We were at the white board, now, and I saw that the wall on which he was writing when he went off the dry erase board was actually a cupboard window, and it had an involved equation written on it.  I took one of my special dry erase marker erase wipes and efficiently swept it away into nothingness.

“I didn’t write that,” Ford said.  We looked at each other for a moment, he quizzical, while my face probably burst into embarrassed fluorescent red.

Oooh noooooo.  I suddenly understood that I had just erased the original writing of the film’s scientist and technical advisor. Harrision was probably using it to copy from so his own writing of the equation would be accurate.  With a light-headed feeling of relief I realized the equation I had just wiped away was still on the dry erase board, but in Harrison’s writing.  Luckily I hadn’t erased that in my unholy zeal to do my little job.

“Hey, they don’t see it, anyway.”  Harrison said into the awkward silence.  I took that as my cue to retreat and stay out of the process.  Another take later and they switched camera angles so it really wasn’t seen.

But the damage had been done.  I had blown my stupid little job in a spectacular and hopeless way.

Maybe I’ll get a chance to redeem myself in the future on this show, but it’s looking bleak at the moment.  Later that day I was asked to apply dulling spray to a car and pulled out a bum can that spewed out white spittle bits instead of a fine mist of clear dulling material.  Where was my spare (and working) can of dulling spray?  Back at the sign I had been aging earlier, about a half mile away.

Yeah, the work day from hell.  I’m so glad today is my day off.