A DJs weekend from hell

I've definitely had better weekends when it comes to DJing! It all started on Friday night - I'd already picked up both the rigs I needed from Rod's house on Thursday, so after work on Friday, all I had to do was drop off the stuff for Ben at his gig in Burley-in-Wharfedale, then race back to Hollins Hall at Guisley, and set up my own rig there.

However, halfway through setting up, Ben phoned me, to tell me that I'd not given him a microphone. Bugger. I got some background music going, then jumped in the van, raced back to Burley, and dropped the spare I had with me off for Ben, only to find that Ben was nowhere to be found, and that there were a load of Emo teenagers pissing about with the rig! I told them off, then raced back to my own gig.

So yesterday, I went back to Burley to pick up the rig with Alice, and just as we're leaving Burley I notice that the "door open" light is flashing at me on the dashboard. I get out and slam all the doors to make sure they're closed, but everything seems to be fine, so I drive on. Then just as we're going up the hill to go home, the boot suddenly opens, and everything spills out onto the road behind us! The speakers seemed to bounce for about 5 years before finally coming to a stop somewhere in Egypt. Bless her, Alice jumped out of the car while we're still moving, and ran to try and get everything picked up, while I parked the car across the road with the hazard lights on to stop these 2 grumpy old men that had since driven up from getting a 1000W JBL speaker-sized imprint in their bonnet. We got everything loaded back in, but found that the catch on the boot had somehow broken, which was why it had come open in the first place, and it wouldn't shut properly. We drove up the hill as slow as possible, and made it home without any incident. Then when I came to open the boot again, the speakers decided to fall out again, one of them directly on my foot, and then went rolling into Alice's knee. I think they have something against us.

From there, it just got worse - I went to set up at my gig last night (a Scottish woman's 70th birthday), to find that only about 20 people had turned up. Just as I was doing a sound check, the woman who'd booked me came up and said "You do have some waltzes, don't you? Only I think the people Betty's age would like that." Greeeaaat. This is gonna be one fun party. I have no waltzes. None. I pride myself on that fact, and to be honest, until this moment, I've never had cause to have any waltzes.

I spent the entire night playing swing tracks to an empty dancefloor. At one point a grand-daughter of the birthday girl asked me for Rhianna - Umbrella, a track which I hate with a passion. But, I figured that since none of the old biddies were requesting anything, I might as well. The younger people in the room instantly got up to dance, but about a minute into the track a miserable old git who looked like he was probably 600 years old came up and started giving me abuse!
"Don't you think you should be playing songs Betty wants?!"
"Well, I've played all the ones on her list, and nobody danced to them, so I thought I'd play this one because the girls asked me for it, is there anything you'd like to dance to?"
"You should fucking know that, you're the DJ!"
At this, he stormed off, to give me evil looks from the other side of the room for the rest of the night, while I was left to play funeral dirges (Danny Boy was a track they'd requested for the event, I ended up playing it 4 times through the course of the evening - if I'd have had a "NOW that's what I call depressing music!" album, they would have been going mental) for the rest of the night, while one daft old man who looked like he'd taken 15 grammes of Ketamine spazzed out on the dancefloor, and had a heart-attack.

To top it all off, because I'd had to put all the equipment on the back seat, when I got home, I couldn't see to reverse, and ended up backing the van straight into the gatepost, pretty much destroying it, and cracking all the brake-lights. Great.