Everything is connected

It was the summer of 2005. A hot few July days were being spent at Park Place, which had formerly been known as Molson Park, an epic outdoor concert and festival space just outside of Barrie Ontario.  Now filled with houses and an industrial park, because… development. I was working the television broadcast of Live 8, an 11 city mega international concert.  Locally the Tragically Hip would be headlining the Canadian stage.

We’d already put in something like 14 hours of a day out in the hot sun.  Earlier in the day I’d gotten to a point where I had to huddle under the stage out of the sun for a while.  A new guy that I was just getting to know on the crew was with me.  I had to pull my shirt off over the freaking hard hat so I could get what little breeze there was hitting my skin directly.  He rushed off to get me a couple bottles of water.  I was in the midst of mild heat stroke.  We just hid there for a while as I recovered.  Didn’t want the rest of the crew knowing.

I did recover, had gotten back to work, plowed through the rest of the day (drinking a lot more water).  And we were nearing the end of setup day number 2.  And it seemed our day was going to get a lot longer.

Concert events have large multi-team audio crews.  We had 3 of them on that gig.  The PA system guys, the guys recording the show for a future DVD and CD release, and us, the live TV guys.

To make a show like that work, all of our systems are integrated and intertwined. We all need the mic signals.  The PA guys need feeds back from us from other venues and other show elements. We all need intercom to communicate. And we all have to work together to make sure everything is clean for everyone else.

We’re integrating a multi-million dollar broadcast TV truck, with a couple of million dollar audio recording trucks (they would alternate bands), with millions of dollars worth of PA gear.

And as we neared the end of setup day two, the festival starting the next day, none of those millions of dollars of equipment were useable.  The entire audio infrastructure has a massive buzz in it.

Tens of millions of dollars worth of audio gear sat unusable as a multi million dollar budget international show hung in the balance.  Hours later… thousands of dollars of overtime later… we found the cause.  A $15 cable that had gone faulty, most likely from abuse.

There are so many other examples throughout history.  In January of 1985, 7 highly skilled, super smart, people lost their lives as the multi-million dollar Challenger Shuttle blew up on take off, thanks to a defective $10 O-Ring.

How many times have 40, 50, 60, 70 thousand dollar cars been recalled to fix a faulty $5 part that could result in the death of it’s occupants?

It doesn’t matter how expensive or valuable a piece of something is, every piece matters, because without every piece, the entire system doesn’t work.

That’s our world. We all need to work together in tandem for our communities to function. We see success individually when everyone sees success.

We value doctors over garbage collectors. But without trash collectors we find ourselves with dirty streets.  An eyesore sure, but this is followed by rats and other vermin.  Which carry disease. And soon our filthy streets are doomed to repeat the black plague, which from 1346-1353 is estimated to have killed between 30-60% of Europe’s population.

Right now, we in Toronto don’t really seem to care all that much about the plight of those in Mexico. Why should we? They’re far away. Aside from bringing us the burrito, what do they do for us?

Except, for a variety of reasons, they’re making mistakes while welding parts. These parts are going into the manufacture of our new streetcars.  These defects are resulting in millions of dollars of delays, putting manufacture Bombardier on the hot seat.  Distracting managers from building and growing the business and employing Canadians as they play defence against lawsuits from the City of Toronto, and combat the media and bad press.  In the meantime, our daily commutes are less comfortable, slower, and less reliable, directly impacting our own individual daily lives.  It’s easy to blame Bombardier.  But if instead we gave a shit about that Mexican worker, these problems wouldn’t be a problem… for us.

It’s all connected.  Everything is connected.

Everyone matters. Everyone’s contribution matters. No one is truly more important than anyone else.  Every cog in the machine needs to be functioning with precision for the system to work.

The $1 million TV audio console is freaking cool. But it’s the $15 cable that’s going to make it all work.

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Cover Photo: Toronto Star