The Unwritten Rules (Every Production Worker Knows These. Now You Do Too.)

Every profession has them — the things that are never in any manual, never covered in any orientation, never explained by anyone directly, that you are nonetheless expected to know and follow. Law firms have them. Restaurant kitchens have them in abundance. Live event production has approximately ten thousand of them, accumulated over decades of collective experience, enforced by nothing except the social consequences of being the person who didn't know.

I'm going to give you some of them. Not all of them — that would take a book, and I'm not writing the book yet — but enough to get you through your first several calls without becoming a story someone tells at load-out about the new person.

**You are always early or you are late. There is no on time.**

Call time is not the time you walk through the door. Call time is the time you are in position, tools in hand, ready to work. Walking through the door at call time means you are already behind, because you still need to find the production office, sign in, get your credentials, find your department, get your assignment, and actually get to the place where work happens. In the time it takes you to do all of that, the people who showed up fifteen minutes early are already working. Add fifteen minutes to every call time you are given, treat that as your actual call time, and you will never be the person the department head is looking for when the day starts.

**You eat when you can, not when you want.**

On a long call, the opportunity to eat will present itself at unpredictable moments and disappear just as unpredictably. When there is food and you have a moment, you eat. You do not wait for a better moment. You do not decide you'll eat later. You eat now, because later the production will need something and the meal break will slide and you will discover at 9pm that the last time you ate was at 10am and you still have three hours of load-out ahead of you. Eat when you can. It is not a complicated rule but it takes new people a while to genuinely internalize.

**The truck is Tetris and Tetris is serious.**

The way gear gets packed into a truck is not random and it is not casual. It is a specific arrangement based on load order — the last thing you need comes off the truck first, which means it goes in the truck last. The weight distribution matters for the drive. The way cases are stacked matters for whether they arrive intact. The person packing the truck has a system and that system exists for reasons that are not always immediately obvious but are always real. Do not rearrange someone else's truck pack unless you are certain you understand the logic of what you're disrupting. When in doubt, ask before you touch.

**The show does not know it is behind schedule.**

The show goes up when it goes up. The audience does not experience the load-in. They experience the show, and the show either happens or it doesn't, and everything between the start of load-in and the moment doors open is in service of making it happen. When the schedule slips — and the schedule always slips — the response is not panic and it is not complaint. The response is recalibration. What can we cut? What can we compress? What needs to happen in what order to still get to a show? The people who are useful in a behind-schedule situation are asking those questions. The people who are not useful are explaining why it isn't their fault that things are behind.

**Cable has a right way and a wrong way.**

Coiling cable is a skill. Over-under coiling — the technique that keeps cable from developing memory and tangling — takes about five minutes to learn and is immediately obvious whether someone knows it or not. If you are new and you don't know how to over-under coil cable, learn before your first call. Watch a video. Practice on your own headphone cord. Then on a call, when you are asked to wrap cable, do it correctly. The alternative is that you become known as the person who returns tangled cable, and in a world where people's gear is their livelihood, that reputation takes a while to recover from.

**Everything goes back where it came from.**

At the end of a call, every piece of gear returns to its case. Every case goes back on the truck. Every tool goes back in the toolbox. Every piece of spike tape comes up off the floor. The venue gets left the way you found it or better. This discipline is not just politeness — it is the operational foundation of the next call, wherever that is, whenever that is. When something is not where it's supposed to be, it costs time to find it, and time on a call costs money, and that money comes out of someone's hide, and it is usually not the hide of the person who left the thing in the wrong place.

**Read the room. Then read it again.**

Production environments have emotional weather and the weather changes fast. A call that started relaxed can tighten in twenty minutes when a problem surfaces. The experienced production worker is always reading the room — is the department head's jaw set in a particular way? Is the PM making a lot of phone calls? Is the stage manager's voice doing the thing where it's very calm in a way that means she is managing something that is not very calm? These are signals. They tell you to pick up the pace, or to ask if there's something you can help with, or to stay out of the way and let the people with the information handle the situation.

Nobody will explain this to you. You learn to read it or you don't, and the people who do become indispensable and the people who don't always seem slightly out of sync with what the day actually needs.

**Take care of the crew around you.**

This is the one I care about most and the one that gets talked about least. Long calls are hard on bodies. They are hard on morale. The people around you are dealing with the same twelve-hour day you are, plus whatever they brought to it from their personal lives and their previous calls and everything else. A person who brings water to their department without being asked, who notices when someone is flagging and picks up their slack without comment, who makes the quiet human gestures that make a long day survivable — that person is worth more to me than someone with twice the technical skills and none of the situational awareness.

The technical skills are learnable. The awareness of the humans around you — that one you choose. Choose it. It makes this whole strange, beautiful industry better.

— Dots

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*That wraps up "What Even Is This Job?" month. Starting next week we go deep on specifics — the festival circuit, what it means to actually work it, and what Do Lab's operation at Lightning in a Bottle taught me about how good festival production runs. See you Monday.*

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*THE GRUNT is written by Dottie M. Soldati (they/them). Find them at soldati.rocks.*

How to Read a Call Sheet (And What It's Really Telling You)

How to Read a Call Sheet (And What It's Really Telling You)"

The call sheet is a piece of paper — or a PDF, we live in the future — that tells everyone on a production when they are expected to be where, doing what, with whom. On its surface it is a scheduling document. Below the surface it is a personality test, an org chart, a threat assessment, and a direct window into the mind of whoever built the production. I have been reading call sheets for two decades and I can tell you more about a production from its call sheet than from any conversation with its producer.

Let me show you what I mean.

**The basic anatomy.**

A call sheet has, at minimum: the date, the venue or location, the general call time (when the overall operation begins), the specific call times for each department or position, and some version of the day's schedule — what's happening when, in what order. On a television production you'll also have a scene breakdown, a cast schedule, weather, and a frankly alarming amount of fine print. In live events, the format is more variable but the bones are the same. Who. When. Where. What.

The first thing I look at is the spread between the earliest call and the latest call. If the riggers are called at 6am and the doors open at 8pm, that's a fourteen-hour spread and someone has built a reasonable cushion into the day. If the riggers are called at 8am and the doors open at 7pm, that's an eleven-hour spread for the same show, which means whoever scheduled this is optimistic in a way that I find professionally alarming. Not impossible — I've made eleven-hour spreads work — but you're driving the whole day with no margin, and margin is the difference between a show that goes up on time and a show that goes up with everyone running.

**What the department order tells you.**

Departments are listed in the order they arrive, which should be the order they're needed, which should reflect a thoughtful understanding of how the load-in sequences. Riggers first, then electrics and audio, then video and scenic, then the departments that need the other departments to be done before they can do their thing. If you see audio called before rigging, either the audio is all ground-stacked and there's no hang, or whoever built this call sheet is working from a template they didn't think too carefully about.

Either way, now you know something.

**The notes section.**

Every call sheet has notes. The notes are where the production manager puts everything that doesn't fit in a box. "Please use the back entrance, main entrance is in use for a separate event." "Load-in crew must wear hi-vis at all times, venue requirement." "Catering is in the green room, which is on the second floor, which does not have an elevator, please plan accordingly." The notes are the shadow show behind the show — the logistics and complications and special circumstances that don't fit in the schedule but will absolutely affect your day if you don't know about them.

Read the notes. Read them again. There is always a person on every call who did not read the notes and this person has a very long day.

**What the meal breaks tell you.**

Union calls have contractually mandated meal breaks at specific intervals. Non-union calls should still have meal breaks at sensible intervals because human beings need to eat and they become significantly worse at their jobs when they don't, which is a thing that some producers understand deeply and some producers understand only in theory. A call sheet with no meal break scheduled is either a short call (fine) or a very long call where someone has decided to handle the food question by leaving it vague (not fine). Vague is not a meal plan. Vague is how you end up with a crew that had a granola bar at 7am and it is now 3pm and the load-out hasn't started yet.

On a well-run call, the meal break is on the call sheet with a location and a duration. On a poorly-run call, the meal break is "TBD" and the TBD gets resolved by someone eventually going on a food run while everyone else keeps working, which is technically a solution and also genuinely bad production.

**The contact sheet.**

Attached to or incorporated into most call sheets is a contact list — who the department heads are, how to reach them, sometimes who the venue contacts are and what the production office number is. This is where I look to understand who I'm working with. If I recognize names — good ones, people I've worked with before, people whose reputations I've heard about — I know something about what to expect from the day. If I don't recognize anyone, I'm in information-gathering mode from the moment I walk in the door.

And if the contact sheet is missing entirely? If the call sheet doesn't tell me who the production manager is or how to reach them or who to call if something goes wrong? That tells me something too. It tells me that this is a production that doesn't yet know what it doesn't know, and I will proceed accordingly, which means I will be very pleasant and I will ask a lot of questions and I will build my own mental map of who runs what because the paperwork isn't going to do it for me.

**The version number.**

Good call sheets have a version number and a timestamp. Call Sheet v1 goes out the night before. Call Sheet v2 goes out at 6am when something has changed. Call Sheet v3 goes out at 9am when the thing that changed in v2 has changed again. If you're on Call Sheet v5 by noon, the show is either very complex or very chaotic or both, and you should pace yourself accordingly.

If the call sheet has no version number, it was built by someone who has never had to send a correction and doesn't yet know that they will. They'll know soon. We all learn eventually.

The call sheet is just paper. But paper made by humans reveals the humans who made it, every time, without fail. Learn to read it right and you'll know what kind of day you're walking into before you walk through the door.

— Dots

"A Civilian's Guide to Not Driving Your Production Crew Insane"

I want to be very clear before we begin that I love the people who hire us. Clients, venue managers, artists, coordinators, festival directors — by and large, these are creative, passionate humans who are trying to make something happen and are genuinely grateful that someone with a tool belt showed up to make it possible. I love them. They are the reason any of this exists.

And they will also, without meaning to, absolutely lose their minds if we do not give them some basic vocabulary and operating procedures. What follows is a public service.

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**Learn the word "call."**

The call is when you are expected to be in the building and functional. Not in the parking lot. Not in the lobby texting that you're almost there. In the building and functional. When someone asks what your call time is, they are asking for this information. When you are not there at your call time, you have made a choice, and that choice has consequences that ripple outward from you through the entire schedule like a pebble in a very stressed-out pond.

**"Spike it" is not a football term.**

When someone asks you to spike something, they want you to mark its position on the floor with tape. This is important. The spike tape is how we know where the thing goes. Without the spike tape we are all just guessing, and guessing on a dark stage with a two-hour load-in window is an experience I would not recommend to anyone.

**The rider is not a suggestion.**

The rider is the technical and hospitality document that specifies exactly what an artist or production requires to perform. It has been written by people who have done this many times and learned the hard way what happens when specific things are not in place. When the rider says the stage monitors need to be a particular brand, that is not the artist being difficult. That is the artist having had a previous experience with a different brand that went badly in a way that affected a performance in front of thousands of people. Read the rider. Honor the rider. If you cannot honor the rider, have that conversation in advance with enough time to actually solve it, and not at sound check.

**The production manager is not the enemy.**

I know they seem like they're telling you no about everything. They are telling you no about some things because those things will break the show, the budget, the timeline, or a federal regulation. The production manager's entire job is to hold about four hundred variables in tension simultaneously and make sure none of them drops. When they tell you they can't add a follow spot at 6pm for an 8pm show, they are not being arbitrary. They are doing math that involves things you are not currently aware of. Trust the math.

**"Practical" means it actually works.**

In scenic and lighting design, a practical element is one that actually does the thing it appears to do — a lamp that is a lamp and not a lamp-shaped prop, a door that opens and not a door-shaped flat. This distinction matters deeply and in specific ways that become apparent at the worst possible moment if you haven't confirmed it in advance.

**Load-in and load-out are different animals.**

Load-in is exciting. You're building something. There's coffee, there's momentum, the vision is becoming real. Load-out is the thing that happens after the show, when the vision has been real for several hours and everyone is exhausted and the venue wants you out in ninety minutes and it's midnight and somebody can't find the road case that the expensive piece of gear lives in. Be kind to the crew at load-out. Be patient. This is the job too.

**"It's giving" is not a technical note.**

I'm just saying. If you want more of something, say more of what. If you want less, say less of what. We are not mind readers. We are riggers and carpenters and electricians and we are very good at solving specific problems with specific tools, but we cannot solve the problem of vibes. Tell us what you want the thing to do and we will make it do that. This is the deal.

**House is not your house.**

"The house" refers to the audience area of a venue, and "house lights" are the lights that illuminate it. When someone says "take it to house," they mean bring the lights up in the audience area. They do not mean illuminate the building in which they personally reside. I have never had to explain this to someone twice, but I have had to explain it once, and once was memorable.

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There are more of these — there are always more — but this is enough for one week. The point is not that civilians are bad. The point is that every industry has a language, and the faster you learn the language, the faster you become someone that the crew is glad to see, instead of someone that the crew is politely managing. We want to be glad to see you. We really do. Come talk to us. Bring us coffee. And for the love of everything, read the rider.

— Dots