Why should you never even try to get 11 people in a room together for several hours, all at the same time, on several different occasions these days?
For the same reason you should never yell “Movie!” in a crowded firehouse — it doesn’t make sense.
What with the Twitter and Facebook and Smartphones and iPads and endless other modern digital etcetera’s people are either too busy trying to keep up to their voracious gigabytes or they let their devices become avatar stand-ins.
“I can’t come to the meeting, but I can Skype in about halfway through.” “Sorry, I won’t be able to make it, but have somebody record the important parts on their phone and text it to me.”
“I’m not coming because I’m too exhausted from answering my 8,000 emails I received today, so just email me the details after the meeting.”
So scheduling meetings is a bit like trying to juggle a bottle of nitroglycerin, a stick of dynamite and a hand grenade – the chance of things blowing up in your face is pretty much a slam-dunk.
You see, we’re putting on this fun music production thing called Time Machine which involves 11 busy musicians, a busload of production people, a trainload of technical people and a shipload of other major and minor details, and over six months or more, of course, many many meetings are required.
Meetings to plan things, meetings to rehearse things, meetings to plan other meetings — a thousand and one details that lead to a million and one decisions. Most of which change once you decide on them.
So — no surprise — we were having trouble getting everyone together to create this very fun and very challenging show featuring many classic rock and pop songs that lots of people might love to come out and enjoy.
The months were flying by, and I was getting to my wit’s end, which isn’t very far at all since I only have half, if you get my drift and then one of the band told me to go doodle.
At first I thought she was telling me to go away and try drawing little random pictures, or she was insulting me in a way I didn’t fully understand.
“Doodle.com” she said.
“Try Doodle.com.”
But I was skeptical of anything that involved the word “doodle”, and then I remembered that “Googol” used to be just a funny obscure word meaning a humongous number of “10 to the 100th power” but look at “Google” now!
So I emailed a Doodle to all 11 musicians. It’s basically a calendar with dates and times on it and everybody votes by clicking a checkmark under the days they are available to meet, and Doodle automatically emails you back with a chart clearly showing the results, and Bob’s your uncle.
Except for the fact that we desperately needed at least five or six meetings, but when out of a dozen or more possible dates over two months only ONE — count ‘em ONE day — came up with all 11 checkmarks.
This made my ears turn bright red and made my teeth hurt, but it certainly wasn’t Doodle’s fault. In fact I would recommend Doodling to anyone trying to herd cats.
But rest assured, we finally figured out our meeting conundrum and I can report that Time Machine 2 Retro Rock & Roll Revue is ready to rock and roll this week at the Scott Block.
Because all this doodling around is just a shameless excuse to tell you all to come out and have a great time travelling Around the World in 30 Songs.
Harley Hay is a writer and filmmaker in Red Deer.