I'm a subcontractor at a reception, and this company is pretty good about giving me details, but every once in a while something gets missed.
What gets missed tonight is that the couple have paid for a "same-day edit" (SDE).
An SDE usually means you edit a highlights video the same day as the wedding, to play later that night. Usually, an editor sits in the car all day while you feed him/her footage. However, for some weddings, the reception is on a separate day from ceremony. The ceremony could have taken place yesterday, or last week. The important point is that, for such a wedding, the editor isn't on site with their equipment.
Which is normally fine. The company sends me a link, and I download it to my laptop. Except, in this case, no one had given forewarning about an SDE, so I didn't have a laptop. I only realise when I arrive at the venue, see the lowered projector screens, and put two and two together.
Ok, breathe calmly. Still 45 minutes to sort this out.
Does any of the rest of my team have a laptop? No, of course they don't. Ok, can anyone at the wedding studio help out -- does anyone live within driving distance? Nope, nothing there either.
OK, ok. I got this. How about the venue? Surely they've got a laptop, or one of the staff has a personal laptop, or something? I head to the venue manager.
"Excuse me..."
He eyes me suspiciously. He's got a room to get ready and a hundred details to manage. Whatever words are about to come out of my mouth, they're not going to be anything good.
"We're playing a same-day edit tonight, but I don't have a laptop. Could you help me?"
He pauses.
"No," he says.
I don't say "Huh?", but my face says "Huh?" in some sort of exaggerated anime way.
What my mouth actually says is: "Um... I guess I could ask the DJ."
"Don't ask him. You've got 30 minutes to find a laptop."
Venue manager probably doesn't want me to fuck with the DJ's setup, and I get that -- I don't want to fuck with his setup either.
I'm tearing hair out now, and the clock is ticking down, like it always does. I make some more calls -- are any of my friends anywhere nearby, and would they happen to have a laptop with them...? But this is obviously a grasping-at-straws attempt, and it yields the expected result.
So, in my mind, there are two more cards I can play. Firstly, I could just ask the DJ anyway. But, secondly -- and this is the plan I decide on -- I can ask the MC to do an announcement and ask if any of the guests has a laptop, because surely, surely there is a laptop in someone's car, among the hundreds of guests here, and surely people would be more than happy to help the bride and groom out.
I stride around the room, searching for the MC, and I encounter the venue manager again.
"Did you find a laptop?" he asks.
"No. But I've got a plan." And then I explain my plan.
His face falls.
"Don't do that. You'll make us look like idiots."
I'm surprised. It never occurred to me he'd react that way.
"Of course we've got a laptop. Everyone's got a laptop."
I wait for the moment of decision.
"Anything goes wrong, it's always our problem," he grumbles.
He enlists a friendly waitress to help, and he follows and stands over us, muttering and clearly unhappy, while the waitress searches the front desk's cabinet. She uncovers two possible candidates, and we go through all the rigmarole with entering password, connecting to WiFi, downloading, etc.
In my head, I'm thinking: "But if you had a laptop anyway" -- and, after the initial exchange, I assumed he hadn't -- "why didn't you just help the first time?" And the answer wasn't at all clear to me. Maybe he didn't want to be responsible if something went wrong. Maybe their laptops contained confidential data, so an outside party shouldn't be using them. Or maybe he simply saw it as beyond the purview of his job, so why should he have to lift a finger?
We return to the room, and I've got an HDMI cable I can use to test.
"Does it work?" he asks.
I hit "play", and, yes, it does.
"Good," he says. "Next time, bring a laptop."
