Warmest regards,
Angie
[dropcaps style=”fancy”]A:[/dropcaps]Hi Angie! Please let me assure you that you have absolutely nothing to worry about. One of the great things about coming to a company like EBE is that we are not a one-man show, so we always have staff available to fill-in in an emergency. That said, we not only realize that this is a once-in-a-lifetime event for you, we embrace it.My personal philosophy is that the only excuse to ever miss a gig is if you are either in jail or are in the morgue. And I certainly hope to be in neither place anytime soon! That’s no joke, though. It seems lately that virtually every storm we have had has been on a Saturday. Remember two years ago when we had three storms, each of which produced at least twenty inches of snow? Two out of those three storms were on Saturday. Hurricane Irene? Saturday. That heavy snowstorm just before Halloween last year? Saturday! Although some clients chose to postpone their events (their choice), we did not miss a single show.
In fact, in many of the above cases we actually (if the venue allowed for it) arrived a day early for setup. This way if the roads were bad and delayed the arrival of the talent, all of the equipment would already be setup and ready to go upon arrival. We have even gone so far in a few cases to put our staff up in a nearby hotel, to minimize that necessary amount of driving on the day of the storm.
Our same attitude applies towards sickness. We realize that this is a job where there is no such thing as “calling in sick.” I have performed at easily over 2000 events in my career, and I have never missed one of them (for sickness or any other reason). As I said, we have staff that we can call in if necessary on emergency standby, but that would only occur in the absolute rarest of circumstances and only under the most critical of emergencies.
Speaking of backup, although you did not ask about this, I wanted to let you know that we are backed up in the case of equipment failure as well. I not only have two laptops that I bring to every event, I also have two hard drives racked into my system. I even have entire second system and some other loose equipment (such as an extra DJ mixer and fourth hard drive). I even have a DJ speaker which has an internal battery and iPod dock, so in the event of power failure, the music will never stop. Hopefully it would never come to that and it may be overkill to bring all of that to every event, but I believe that one can never have too much backup.
I hope this helped! I’m looking forward to celebrating with you in a few weeks!
Best,
Ben