Dean's Blog

People are not like electricity or water, because those latter two things will take the easiest route to whatever it is they need to get to next. Water, for example, is quite lazy and will always go downhill rather than uphill, and electricity is always taking the easy road and simply burning your toast instead of nicely browning it, because the insulation of your toaster has prevented it from frying your brain to kill you instantly, it uses carcinogenics as a chemical weapon against you.

At any case, Humans have a philosophy of resistance. It begins at a young age. Babies resist digesting their milk by spewing it down the collar of your shirt. Toddlers prefer to have a stewing diaper at critical mass, rather than have a clean bottom. Kids resist bathing, cough syrup, and homework, teenagers resist responsibility and accountability, and finally once we get out of the larval stages of human development, it gets worse.

I’ve been helping a friend of mine for several years now with his Mobile Disc Jockey service, and of course this is the time of year for corporate Christmas parties. We try to be quite sensible about how we set up the equipment, as it is expensive, heavy, and full of many many little electricities. We try to keep things out of the way so that no one will trip, fall, bump, or otherwise gash themselves to death. We also make a clear path so that anyone can come up and request a song that they would like to hear. So, in the seven years that I have been involved with all this, how has it all turned out?

Sometimes I wonder how we even managed to invent the fork, without blowing ourselves to bits. Invariably, every event people approach the DJ booth to request a song, by pretending that they are Delta Force Operatives who also just happen to be missing one hemisphere of brain. It is somewhat horrifying to turn to the side and see some 80 year old gentleman crawling through the assorted cables, wires, and truss support system that makes up 1800 pounds of electronic equipment. They come in droves, tripping over everything that they can possibly touch in order to come talk to us, scraping their elbows, knees and other associated extremities in the process, all the while a clearly indicated and unobstructed access point exists. Of course, once they have managed to crawl through the trenches to get to us, I do point them out to the appropriate path that they should have taken, and refuse to speak to them until they use it.