unwritten rules — The Grunt — Soldati.Rocks LLC

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.*