Fresh out of studying, I managed to score the sweetest position possible. Most of the students in my class had seemed to think that working in festivals would be the cream of the events crop and I was offered the job of Crew Manager for Easterfest. I’d volunteered there the previous year so they knew me and when I wrote and asked for work experience, offered me a job instead. Woo!
In February I moved up to Toowoomba for 3 mths, moving in
with the parents of some friends of friends. They were away so I didn’t even
meet them for the first month.
Working for Easterfest was hectic but fun. That first
year I had no idea what goes into making a festival happen and the Crew Manager
position was a new one so everything was untested and fresh. A new database
system called Tracker had been developed to coordinate the hundreds of
volunteers that make up the Easterfest Crew and I developed a few systems of my
own to help with stuff that was a little more outside of the box.
Easterfest treat their crew a little unusually from most
festivals in that it offers cheap meals and a separate crew area, crew shirts
available at a few prices, families get special treatment and there is a range
of accommodation options available depending on various factors. It gets
complex. I worked for Easterfest for 3 months from February to the end of April
and spent a lot of time asking questions, rechecking data from the system and
answering hundreds of random emails from potential crew, as well as sourcing
and researching new ways to recruit people. But mostly, I typed. I entered
hundreds of forms into Tracker, Name, Address, Email…. Five pages of
information to be entered for each person and then they got emailed, invoiced
for meal/shirt payment, and a whole list of other things for every single
person. I can still recognise most of the names of our crew and am so good at
typing now!
As festival drew nearer the staff’s days got longer, no
one really noticed as 5pm came and went, most nights someone would take a
dinner order and bring back food which we ate at our desks, still trying to
finish a mountain of work in a molehill of time. Everyone’s exhausted,
stressed, and nerves very easily get frayed. It’s a crazy time.
Fortunately, if you’re an event person at least, it’s
also fantastic. There’s a rush of adrenaline that happens from the
impossibility of it all and small victories or unexpected wins can take on huge
significance. You become a vital part of something so much bigger than
yourself, the team needs you and you need the team to be the best – even better
than the best. It’s challenging and draining and you race through highs and
lows like never before, constantly pushing yourself further than you’d ever
tried because stopping wasn’t an option. It has to get done and it has to be
right. No if’s, buts or maybes.
So after that
serious rant, onto the fun stuff.
The year was 2007. I didn’t know much, I screwed up a
lot, probably more than I still realise. But the festival was amazing, the
people are some of the greatest people I know and the experience was
incredible. (I’m going to have to buy some more adjectives at this rate…)
Working in festivals is a fantastic job but is definitely
not for everyone. People who aren’t commited to giving a million percent and
putting the job before pretty much everything will only frustrate the rest of
the team. You have to do it for the love, not the money. In my experience,
getting into festivals involves a lot of 3 months contracts, a lot of moving
around, a lot of being unemployed in between gigs and a lot of having no idea
what you’re doing. It’s an admin job most of the time then for 3 weeks it will
be a tradie job, the only job description is ‘do what needs to be done’.
This is events. The show must go on.
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