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

---

*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.*

---

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

The Org Chart Nobody Gives You (But You Need to Understand Immediately)

On your first day at a corporate job they probably gave you an organizational chart. It had boxes and lines and everyone's name and title and you could see exactly who reported to whom and how information was supposed to flow through the organization. I've never had a job that came with an org chart. I've never even heard of anyone in this industry who got an org chart. What you get instead is a call sheet, which as we discussed Wednesday tells you some of this if you know how to read it, and the rest of it you have to figure out in real time, in a building, while other things are happening.

Since nobody handed me a chart when I started, let me hand you one now.

**The Producer.**

The producer is the person or entity responsible for the show existing at all — they hold the money and the vision and the relationships with the venue and the artist, and they are ultimately responsible for all of it. On a large festival this is a whole organization. On a smaller show it might be one person who is also doing their own advance work, driving their own rental truck, and texting the artist's manager from the parking lot at load-in. Producers range, in my experience, from people who are genuinely brilliant at the big picture and smart enough to hire people who handle everything else, to people who are in slightly over their heads and compensating with enthusiasm. Both types can produce a good show. The first type produces it with considerably less drama.

**The Production Manager.**

The PM is the person I care about most on any given call, and if you're coming up in this industry, they should be the person you care about most too. The production manager translates the producer's vision into logistics — they do the advance, they build the schedule, they manage the budget, they coordinate between departments, they are the single point of contact for everything that needs to be coordinated. A great PM is like a very calm person doing a great deal of math in public. A bad PM is like watching someone try to juggle with one hand while putting out a fire with the other, which is entertaining to observe and terrible to work under.

The PM is not the person you go to with every problem. The PM is the person you go to when the problem cannot be solved at any other level. Before you go to the PM, you talk to your department head.

**The Department Heads.**

Every department on a production has a head: a Lighting Director or Head Electrician, an Audio Engineer or FOH Engineer, a Head Carpenter or Technical Director, a Head Rigger, a Video Director, a Stage Manager. These are the people responsible for their respective domains — for the work their crews do, for the gear their departments use, for the execution of their part of the production. Department heads report to the PM and manage their crews. They are where most of the real decision-making lives on a day-to-day load-in call.

When something goes wrong in a department, the department head knows about it first and handles it first. If they can't handle it, it goes to the PM. This chain exists for a reason. Short-circuiting it — going directly to the PM about something your department head should handle, or going to the producer about something the PM should handle — is how you mark yourself as someone who doesn't understand the chain, which is not the impression you want to make in the first hour of a call.

**The Keys.**

One level below department heads are the "keys" — the key positions within a department. The A2 in audio (the person who handles stage monitors and mic coordination while the A1 runs FOH). The Best Boy in lighting (the second-in-command to the Gaffer or Head Electrician, handling crew and equipment coordination). The Key Grip. The spot callers and follow spot operators. These are the people who make departments run — experienced workers who don't need to be told what to do next and who often effectively supervise the other crew without having the title of department head.

If you are coming up and you are trying to get better, make friends with the keys. Watch them. Ask them questions between calls when they have a minute and are clearly not in the middle of something. The keys know where all the knowledge lives.

**The Crew.**

Everyone else. The stagehands, the loaders, the run-of-show crew, the day players who got called for a specific skill on a specific call. The crew is where the physical work gets done — things get moved, hung, plugged in, taped, built, struck. Good crew shows up on time, does the work, asks questions when they don't know something, and stays in their lane while also being ready to do whatever needs doing when something unexpected comes up. Good crew is worth more than good equipment, and if that sounds like an exaggeration, you haven't been on a call where someone sent you great gear and terrible people to run it.

**The Artist and Their Team.**

The artist — the performer, the act, the band, whoever is actually doing the thing the audience came to see — exists somewhat adjacent to this structure. They usually have a tour manager who interfaces with the production manager, a technical director or production coordinator who interfaces with the department heads, and depending on the scale of the operation, various rider requirements and preferences that need to be accommodated within the production's logistical reality. The relationship between the touring team and the production team is its own whole thing that I will give a full post to eventually, because it deserves one.

**The Stage Manager.**

I've saved this one for last because the stage manager's position on the org chart depends enormously on the type of production, and because I have strong opinions about the stage manager's value that I want to express without accidentally burying them. In theater, the SM is the production's operational nerve center during the show itself — they call every cue, they are in communication with every department, they run the world. In live events and festivals, the role is more variable. Sometimes the PM also serves as the running SM. Sometimes there's a dedicated stage manager who runs the show from the wings while the PM handles logistics. Sometimes the structure is so loose that nobody has the title and the job gets distributed.

Wherever you find them, the stage manager or the person doing that job is the person who knows where everything is supposed to happen and when. In a crisis, they are the calmest person in the building. If they are not the calmest person in the building, that is important information about how the rest of the show is going to go.

Nobody will give you this chart. Now you have it. Get in there.

— Dots

---

*Next week we zoom in on rigging — what it actually is, why it matters, and why the person holding the rope has more in common with a structural engineer than you might think.*

---

*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