Don't feel too bad about it. Just remember you ARE allowed one mistake.

Having said that, I should point out that if you make one more mistake I'm gonna fire your ass!

I was in the Air Force, stationed in Bangkok. Our unit operated super-secret (at the time) electronics for monitoring nuclear weapons testing by other countries (mainly China, but France was still testing at the time too). Our station was next to Bangkok's main airport. Commercial power there was very unreliable, so we had 3 big diesel emergency generators: 1 for utility, 1 for tech equipment, and 1 spare. I think they were 50KW generators. In case of a commercial power failure, one of us would stay inside & shut off all the equipment, while the other would sprint out to the generator shack, fire up 2 of the 3 generators, and get tech power running first, followed by utility power. The person inside would bring all the equipment back online.

We had been on emergency generators for several days, and finally commercial power came back on and seemed stable. Now getting the place switched back to commercial power, without any interruption or downtime, was very tricky. There was a crude monitoring system in the generator shack that displayed if the commercial power & the generator were in sync with each other. The idea was to get commercial & generator power perfectly in phase (by raising or lowering the generator's AC frequency slightly), cut in the commercial breaker, and cut off the generator. So for a couple seconds, our generator would be running in parallel with commercial power.

Did I mention that I was new there?

My shift partner, who was none too swift but still had seniority over me, takes me out to the generator and shows me exactly what to do. "Watch this light. Start adjusting the generator's frequency, and when the light is ON bright & steady, power is synchronized & in phase. That's when you cut in the commercial power, and quickly cut off the generator."

No problemo. He goes back inside to watch over the equipment. I start adjusting the gen. freq. to match commercial. I get the phase light so it's on steady and bright, and cut in the commercial breaker.

Well, before I had a chance to do anything else, this huge generator started bucking and struggling, and smoke started pouring out of the alternator. I was like "Holy crap, what the hell's going on!!??" I at least had the sense to quickly shut the thing down. Smoke was billowing out of the shed now. This was day shift, full office staff there, so of course everyone comes running out of the office building to see what's going on. Our unit commander had an IQ no higher than room temperature on a cool day, and he was in a panic because of all the paperwork he would have to fill out. "I'm personally responsible for this!!!" Then someone reminded him that regulations required the local fire dept. be called in case of ANY fire-related emergency. So they call the airport's Thai fire crew, explaining that this is an electrical fire, and requesting that the fire crew respond accordingly. The fire truck arrives about 10 mins. later with nothing but water.

So we start sorting it out, and find out that my shift partner had a brain fart about that phase light. Commercial & generator power were in phase when the light was completely OFF, not ON. When the light was on, the 2 power sources were 180 degrees out of phase with each other. And believe me, you don't want to parallel your generator with commercial power when they're 180 degrees out of phase with each other.

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Another story of working in Bangkok, and it's actually film-related. We worked 2-man 12-hour shifts. The graveyard shift would not always have a lot of work to do, so sometimes one of us would grab a few hours of sleep while the other kept an eye on all the equipment. We had a darkroom for developing 500 foot rolls of 35mm b/w film (equipped with a Labmaster automated 35mm film developer). Well, since it was a darkroom and there was a large countertop work surface, we would sleep in there on top of the counter.

Did I mention that power was very unreliable? We were all hyper-sensitive to variations in line frequency, voltage sags, etc. in commercial power and we tended to be paranoid about it, because we were never supposed to have more than 2 minutes of equipment downtime if the power failed. Any more than 2 minutes down and we had a lot of 'splaining to do.

Well, it's my turn to sleep, so I'm in the darkroom, sleeping, shoes off. I'm sound asleep, lulled by the hum of the equipment. All of a sudden commercial power drops. I immediately wake up thinking "Oh shit, I'm the designated generator operator!!" Instinctively, I know I need to get up NOW. Forgetting where I am and being in total darkness, not to mention foggy-headed, my right leg flies up as hard as it will go, and I jam my big toe into the bottom of a cupboard above the counter I'm sleeping on. This pain shoots up my leg, but I manage to drag myself out to the generators and get them going.

When the dust settled, I found out I had jammed my foot into the bottom of the cupboard so hard I broke my big toe. The toe was smashed over sideways, about 45 degrees off from where it should have been pointing. When I went to the doctor, he couldn't really do anything for it. It was about 3 years before I had full flexibility of that toe again, and it's still crooked.

How many people can claim they've broken a limb while sleeping on the job?

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I can almost relate that Air Force job to being a projectionist...

The equipment we were running was ancient. It recorded data on successive frames of 35mm b/w film. Most of the electronics were tube, but some of it was solid state and even digital. Back then, a flip-flop circuit was made of discrete components (transistors etc.) on a plug-in circuit board. One board = One flip-flop! No ICs. There were 8 6-foot tall standard 19" racks, filled to capacity with power supplies and other junk.

When a nuclear device is exploded in the atmosphere, it emits a very unique and strong pulse of energy at 10KHz (this is the infamous electromagnetic pulse that's supposed to cause most solid-state devices to be disabled when a big nuke goes off -- Same type of pulse they were creating in Oceans 11 to knock out all the power in Vegas). The signal was picked up on an array of loop antennas, which allowed triangulation of the source. It was amplified, and split into analog and digital components. The analog 10KHz waveform was displayed on an oscillosope-type CRT. The digital data (the signal's amplitude, direction, precise time, etc.) was displayed on a matrix of high-intensity LEDs (actually I think they were some kind of neon tubes), as binary coded decimal data, BCD. These two images were reflected through a series of mirrors and recorded side-by-side on a frame of film.

Unfortunately, there is a LOT of natural atmospheric electrical noise at 10KHz, so we chewed through those 500' rolls of film pretty quickly sometimes. Since they didn't want any gaps in the recorded data, and the rolls of film were limited to 500', we had 2 complete, identical arrays of film recorders. While one was recording, the operator would load up the other one with film. We had to load the magazines in the darkroom, thread the film, record a series of calibration signals on the leader, and ensure that the system clocks were sync'd to UTC. We had an atomic reference clock there for that.

So a good operator would be able to do "changeovers" by himself (while his partner slept - ). The trick was to accurately predict when the operational system would run out of film, based on the rate of film being used, which varied up and down all the time. When you decided the recording system was about to run out of film, you would run the calibration recording sequence on the other system, and start recording data exactly at the top of the minute. The 2 systems would overlap for exactly 1 minute, then you would cut off the one coming down and record another series of calibration images on the tail of the film. Run out the tail, take the magazine into the darkroom, unload and box the exposed film, and load the magazine with a fresh 500' roll.

This one time, I accidentally ruined a roll of freshly-recorded film by exposing it to light. This was very bad. My partner & I talked it over, and decided to load up the spare recorder with fresh film, set the system clock back to the exact start time of the original, ruined run of film, and record a new [bogus] roll as if nothing had happened. We had to make sure the other system didn't run out of film itself during this time, so we tweaked the sensitivity settings on it to minimum, slowing the recording rate to almost nothing (and conceivably filtering out a genuine signal). Yes folks, the security of your country was in our capable hands.

My take on it is, "Hey Paramount, you want a perfect show? Pay for a test run, you cheap &%^$#&s."

Frank

Running Love Story (1970) in about 1978 in a drive-in. My boss was off the lot for 15-20 minutes. Reel 2 was ending. I loaded up reel 4 and started it. About 2 minutes went by... then the car horns started. I figured out what had happened, stopped the reel 4. The horns stopped, too. Got on the intercom and told the audience what happened, and please give me a couple of minutes. Then turned on the music. I got a round of horn toots, then silence. I quickly loaded reel 3 and resumed the show.
Funny thing though, my boss was the one that set the next reel in front of the projector! When he came back, I told him what happened, and what I did. He was mortified at what he had done, and offered his apologies.
Happily, we had zero complaints that night. Fairly full house, too. I like to think that most of the patrons were actually watching the movie.

My first job in a booth at the brand-new Regal Royal Palm, the only megaplex and stadium seating theater for 50 miles at the time, which would get guests such as Donald Trump and Tommy Lee Jones in the coming years, sell the most tickets in north america for Lethal Weapon 4, the most in Florida for Star Wars Episode 1, yadda yadda yadda.... Anyway, grand opening, me building my first print: "City Of Angels". I wasn't there to witness it run for the first time as I was in school. I come in later that day and see the manager with a disappointed look. He explains that I reversed the soundtrack on one of the reels, so that it was on the screen. They stopped the show, fixed it, and on the very next reel it happened again. First show at a brand new flagship theater.... PASSED HOUSE! Next print I built: "Deep Impact"... flawless

The other was a year or so later, with "A Night At The Roxbury". It had just been moved to a bigger house because it kept selling out. I just came in for the evening shift on Friday after this new guy, who built the print. He told me that there were bad splices at every trailer, and to stand there and frame it until the feature. This was absurd, so I built a new trailer head, dropped it in, and stood there to watch them play through. Changeover opens, and the words "THIS FALL" are upside down and backwards on the screen! I shut the douser and hit the sound to Non-Sync. As Brad said, I wait and wait and wait... the trailer was the 5-minute "Pleasantville" crap! But since it was the first trailer, my quick thinking made it look like just an upside-down slide. Rest of the trailers were fine, THEN it brainwraps at the feature. Sometimes you just can't win...

I found this out the hard way showing an archive print of The Wedding March. Big show, 20-piece orchestra. The print didn't arrive until 20 minutes before showtime, so no time to check it properly. The head leaders were Academy ones with a soundtrack, so I assumed that if I laced the track the right way round then the picture would be, too. That was not a safe assumption to make. The reel change came in the middle of a climactic scene: the incoming reel opened with an intertitle, which appeared in mirror-writing. There was nothing for it but to stop and relace.