Editor’s Note

This month I’m celebrating a 10 year anniversary. Ten years ago I was fired for the second time in 18 months. Oddly enough, I didn’t receive a single greeting card. Some people might think that getting fired twice in 18 months is no cause for celebration. Those people are wrong.

Did you see Fortune’s list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For in 2009?” Don’t kill yourself looking for your company on the list because it’s not there. Not a single company from the live event production industry made the list. Who are they kidding?

“There were no limits to the imagination and no limits to creativity.” —Peter Morse, LD for Michael Jackson’s later tours

By the time you read this, most of you will have had your fill of the media’s coverage of the untimely demise of a certain King of Pop. But the industry owes him a great debt of gratitude for setting the high mark in production standards.

The sk8rs on Centre Street in New York City go out of their way to seek out danger. The more dangerous, the better. I know this because I witnessed it first hand. I was in the City for the maiden voyage of the North American Theatre Engineering and Architecture Conference (NATEAC) last month. The conference was an excellent exchange of information and ideas about all things relating to the design, construction, and use of performing arts spaces.

In 2006, famed physicist Stephen Hawking said that we need to colonize space in order to preserve the future of the planet. I think we need to colonize space in order to preserve the dignity of the human race. Can we go any lower than The Bachelor, Dancing with the Stars and Rock of Love with Bret Michaels?

Do you remember the episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! when Scooby refused to tie in the electrical feeder cable for the rock show because he felt it was unsafe? Of course not. Stopping the show for safety reasons takes a lot of courage, self-confidence, and maybe even a little bit of madness. And that’s just not the big, bongo-playing Great Dane we all know and love.

That giant fluttering sound you heard last month was the sound of 600 million American eyelids opening at once. Such was the reaction to Mike Wallace’s report on 60 Minutes highlighting a study from Leicester University in Leicester, England about happiness. The study reported that Denmark was the happiest country in the world. In fact, it has ranked first in Eurobarometer surveys for the last 30 years.

I walked into my first ESTA Technical Standards Committee and quickly surveyed the room. Situated around the conference table were some of the brightest minds in the industry and some of the most dedicated people upstage of the proscenium. I felt like a Ford driving onto a Mercedes lot.

Don’t look now, but your boss is looking over your shoulder. More and more of them are.

Let’s not kid ourselves — you may think your boss is a moron, but you’ve got to give the guy credit for starting and running a business. It’s not child’s play — it’s tough, and it’s getting tougher all the time. But then so is being an employee, especially in these exponential times when technology is changing faster than Hannah Montana concert tickets are selling. And now employees have to take even more responsibility for their own productivity.

I don’t know if it will get you money for nothing or chicks for free, but I want my ACN, and so should you. ACN is the latest control protocol developed by the ESTA Control Protocols Working Group and was published late last year. It stands for… never mind what it stands for. It could stand for Another Cool Name or Artificial Canadian Nickels — it doesn’t matter. What does matter is what it will do and where it will eventually take this industry.

I was once on a gig where, for no apparent reason, the power distro went snap, crackle, pop. Really, it was more like crackle, big snap, bright flash, little pop, smoke puff. That’s not a sight and sound you want to experience first thing in the morning, not even when you’re having cereal. The dimmer tech who energized the PD, just before the impromptu light and sound show, went looking for the house electrician who had just tied in the feeder cables. He was nowhere to be found. Then he went looking for someone more qualified than himself to resolve the problem before doors a few hours later.