The company who are partly responsible for the power flow in this festival, watched me try and charge my phone with the plugs at the side of the forum so they switched them off. Profoundly unhelpful and antisocial. I know my way around this shit, I almost brought an adapter from outside to inside but there are plenty of venues running monitors etc that have a spare plug. I don’t have to charge my phone in the most logical place. So I plugged it in where I had to watch it.
Where does one go to charge phones? I checked at info tent. “Nowhere”, I got back. Fine, there used to be ridiculous bastards charging a fiver to plug your phone into a slow charger for an hour at Glastonbury. Perhaps it needs to be down to the individual. But… I’ve been here three days. Firebird are being dicks even though I’m working in the venue and I think it might be because I was open with them. “I came in to try and charge my phone,” I said to some idiot child playing with dinosaurs. They’ve not only switched off the outlet I was using, they’ve also barricaded it. I’d say it was a bunch of cunts but more likely it’s one cunt, Mr dinosaur cunt.
They have gaps everywhere but they closed the circuit I openly told them I was aiming to use which probably feels to them like they’re doing something. There are always multiple circuits still free scattered about but needing the right adapter or just being in the backstage area and needing supervision. I used to carry an adapter from out to in but stopped doing it when pretty much every festival realised that participants needed to charge their phones and made provision. Years later! Firebird are amateurs compared to most of my international jobs, how can they deliberately isolate plugs to prevent participants from charging? They have managed largely to run this festival without plunging us into darkness, and maybe they are nervous about it. It’s very important to get these things right, I guess, and they might be new at this stuff and punching above their weight. In the desert, where everything comes from solar and wind we have to be really careful. But these guys have mains power. And I’m plugging in my phone, not a fucking kettle.
Arguably the guy is just being a gargantuan twat. I might try and talk with him tomorrow as I didn’t think it was legit to ask him to stop isolating the circuit on days we aren’t working in his venue. Tomorrow we are in his venue again so hopefully he can push a button.
AlBarclay 