Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: I broke a violin at work today

This is topic I broke a violin at work today in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by John Lasher (Member # 968) on 09-15-2003, 11:53 PM:

I forgot to latch the case shut when moving it from the back counter to the front counter and out it fell, onto the floor. The manager has assured me that it's ok (it was a 1/2 size student model that had been rented out 3-5 times before) I found all of the parts (so it would lie flat in the case, I removed the strings, so whoever repairs the thing will have to put a new set on)

Have any of you ever broken anything at work? (This is my first semi-major screw-up)

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 09-16-2003, 12:02 AM:

Just collapsed the bridge? Happens all the time. You can fix it up and restring it in munutes if you know your cookies. (Assuming no other damage.)

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 09-16-2003, 06:08 AM:

During my time at music college, we had a concert in the local opera theatre. I mean a symphony concert where the orchestra is on the stage, not an opera performance where the orchestra is in the pit.
Anyway, a theatre has an iron curtain which is supposed to come down in the event of fire to seperate the auditorium from the stage house. There is a white line across the stage where the iron curtain will make contact with the floor.
Fire code in Germany requires that the iron curtain is tested before every performance. So they made an announcement that the iron curtain would be tested now, and please don`t leave anything on the white line.
Sure enough, one of my classmates left his double bass lying on the floor with the neck across the white line, haha!!!
Actually, the instrument belonged to the school. The neck and fingerboard were completely shattered, and the corpus was basically "intact", but there were so many fractures across the wood that it was impossible to repair it.
So the decapitated bass sat in the corner in a room. We asked our professor if we could throw it out of a window from the 3rd floor, just to see what it looks like when a bass flies out of the window.
Somehow, he never warmed to the idea though.

Even better was when they started renovating the ground floor of the school.
They had to move the pianos to the first floor, so the school bought a device which looked like a little tank with flexible tracks and a flat top. The pianos - actually grand pianos - were tied to the flat top, upright on the left side which is not curved.
The tank thing was supposed to be able to climb stairs on the tracks, and it was controlled with a remote on a wire.
One of the piano professors was so excited about the new machine that he insisted on piloting it himself.
It was really quite high tech. Unfortunately, our stairs were really old and low tech (one of the reasons they wanted to reconstruct the place), so one of the steps collapsed under the weight and sent the tank with the grand piano on it down the stairs, burying the teacher under the piano.
He had one leg broken, and the tank was completely messed up. So they trashed it and rented some big guys from a moving company to schlepp the pianos upstairs.

Posted by John Lasher (Member # 968) on 09-16-2003, 10:41 PM:

The neck snapped in half. Here's something interesting, I had someone bring in a rental 3/4 size violin for repair, they had done the same thing with better results (still something that needed to be sent up to the string shop at one of our stores in PA) I was tempted to show her the other violin. (She had damage coverage, so the repair will be done free of charge and we were able to loan her another violin while her's is in the shop.)

Posted by Bruce McGee (Member # 131) on 09-17-2003, 08:04 AM:

Back in the early days of MY TV repair business mid 1980's:

Working on the first 26" color TV with stereo sound that I had seen. (The C8 Phillips chassis) I laid a screw on top of the set. This was one of my NO-NO commandments, but I did it.

Yes, the screw fell into the freshly repaired set and fried the power supply. It caused what they called a "cascade failure" that took out 28 parts. I had to order everything, plus tell the customer what I had done and how long it would be.

5 days later, it was fixed. It's owner is still a customer today, and the set is long dead in the landfill after 10 years of good service-- after I got my gorilla hands on it.

It's the one and only time that I have actually blown up a ready-to-go set, and obviously, I never forgot it.

Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 09-17-2003, 09:46 AM:

John! Your post about the violin makes me think of one thing: Inspector Clouseau stepping on the violin in one of the Pink Panther movies!

As for breaking things -- I can't remember breaking anything at work. I think I may have done some damage to a copy machine once by pressing too hard on the top that you have to put down over a book that you're copying. It started making some loud noises when copying and the copy quality was terrible afterwards.

In Fall 1980, when I started taking 16mm projectors to classes and setting them up for teachers before school each day in the 7th grade, the first projector I took on the first day jammed on me very badly. It was a Bell and Howell autoload, so I fed the film exactly as I was supposed to and waited for it to come out the other end. It didn't and putting the projector in reverse just pulled the film in further! The projector had to be partially disassembled to get that mess out of there. Fortunately, this little disaster I had on the first day of doing that was the worst I ever had in the two school years (7th and 8th grade) that I did that.

I may have hosed up a SCSI hard drive once. We had an SGI Indy that we got in late 1993 or early 1994, I beleive, and I hooked an external SCSI device to it, forgetting to set the SCSI ID on it. It was the same as the SCSI ID of the internal hard drive. fsck totally hosed the filesystem on the internal hard drive and I had to reinstall IRIX (their UNIX version). After reinstalling, I noticed messages about bad blocks in the system log. I wouldn't be surprised if it weren't due to the accident. We had a full maintenance contract on the machine, so SGI came and put a new drive in it when I reported the bad blocks in the syslog. We paid a lot of money for that type of maintenance and eveidentally, replacing hard drives and motherboards in machines were ordinary routine things for them.

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 09-17-2003, 10:29 AM:

Breaking a girl's instrument? Shame shame...you know it is wrong to commit violins against women.

Posted by Matt Hale (Member # 1518) on 09-17-2003, 01:32 PM:

I spilled my beer in a recording console once - in the middle of a session. Considering the band, I think the resulting noises in the track were actually an improvement.

That incident is one of the reasons I don't drink anymore.

Posted by Daniel Fuentz (Member # 1684) on 09-18-2003, 05:59 AM:

The only thing that ever broke on me at work was a 1" videotape copy of a movie. I was rewinding it on a VTR after airing it and the tape snapped in half mid-rewind. Somehow the machine kept rewinding so the tape just started flying off the reels all over the control room. That wasn't very fun to clean up.