The Etiquette of ‘Standing By’

Today, our “Friday”, we will spend most of the day riding in heated comfort in “follow vans” with a fake city bus carrying camera and cast to shoot several scenes.  The one day on this shoot when I could have read a book without feeling lazy or guilty, and I forgot it on the seat of my truck, some four miles away down in crew parking.  However, this does give me an opportunity to write my blog entry.  The subject of today’s blog is: what to do during those hours of “doing-nothing-but-standing-by” time.  There are unwritten (until now, anyway) rules as to what you can and cannot do.

Firstly, even if everyone, including the producers and studio moguls who might visit the set at any moment, knows that you will often, as part of your job, be doing nothing other than standing by near the set waiting to be called in to do your small but critical part, it’s not acceptable to be engaged in any activity but those listed below.

You can be seen reading the “sides” or the call sheet (but after the twentieth read-through, this begins numbing the brain).  You can be seen talking to someone in your department on the radio (about anything, really, as long as you keep it off channel one or any of the designated walkie channels being used by other departments such as grip, electric, et al.).  You can’t talk during rehearsal, or heaven forbid, shooting.  And you have to keep the chatter down, lowering your voice to give the conversation, at least on your end, an urgent quality, should anyone of producer or supervisor ilk be within earshot—as if you are dealing with some important departmental issues.  By the way, I never do this; talk on the radio.  But I’m not a phone person, either.

            You are also allowed, in the event that you are “standing by” 1)inside, and 2) with a free chair or table nearby (both of which have been exceedingly rare on this show) to work on your laptop if you have even a vague reason to do so that is related to your job.  Myself, the only job-related thing that I might be doing on my computer is making my weekly invoice.  But other departments, such as wardrobe and set dresser, might be downloading continuity photos, prepping for the upcoming shoot days, or various other tasks.  Of course they might be playing solitaire or reading their horoscope, but who’s to know if they minimize that window at the right moments?

If you are a stills person, a stand-in, or one of the vanities (hair, make-up, wardrobe), you may, with no questions asked, read the newspaper.  More iffy, for some reason, is reading a book; perhaps because this implies a commitment on your part to reading at work.  It implies that perhaps you value this book as much as you value waiting for your call to set.  This kind of prioritizing would almost certainly be seen as wrong in the right circles.

With a newspaper, however, you can give the impression that perhaps someone else left it near set and you just happened across it accidentally and are briefly scanning it with only a passing interest, eager to toss it aside at the first hint of being called upon to work.

Within all departments, however, with the possible exception of PA’s, there is one completely permissible, non-compromising of one’s work ethic “standing-by-time” activity: fooling around on your phone.  You can text back and forth with family, friends, and enemies all day.  If you have a BlackBerry or an Iphone, you can check emails, write emails, download interesting apps, surf the web, shop online, bid on ebay, sell on ebay, or look up any kind of information, whether it applies to your job or not, like the definition of “azimuth”, which sounds like the name of a demon, but is actually a technical term, the exact meaning of which I had forgotten but felt I needed to review today for my own piece of mind.

If you have the right apps on your phone, you can even read the script and the latest script changes.  I have never been more interested in my phone than when I’ve been on standby for hours at a time—and, as I may have mentioned, I am not a phone person.  But I am a person who hates to be bored.

So if you play your cards right (that’s a metaphor—don’t play cards in reality on set, because that is a definite faux pas), you too, can do your standing-by time in correct style, and semi-functionality, at least when it comes to accomplishing things over your phone.

And in case you’re wondering, the “horizontal direction expressed as the angular distance between the direction of a fixed point (as the observer’s heading) and the direction of the object” (according to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) is also known as the “azimuth”.