The people I feel for the most, is the very nice people that bankrolled the event.... lets just say they had to keep digging in their pockets every 5 mins.
I'm disappointed in Mark Cantril myself. I spoke to him a few days before the event, asking about taking some short video clips of the whole thing. He brought up a idea about how he always wanted a behind the scenes video done. Nice guy that I am, I said I would take a shot at doing it.
I found out that I would have to take off 12 hours of work to do it, and I had no vacation time left, so I worked a couple of 14 hour days to make up for the time I had to take off. He wanted me to get footage each day and then rush home and edit it and upload it.
I knew this was going to be a pretty time consuming project for me. Driving 50 miles to Lincoln, hanging around and shooting video, then driving 50 miles back home, then spend hours going thru the video and editing out clips I could use, spending more hours putting the video together, then even more time uploading it to the vimeo site.
So I knew it was going to be a lot of work for me, 20+ hours of editing video over a couple of days. Then 6 hours of driving back and forth. And about 30 hours of finding stuff to film.
I said I would do all of this for free basically, but I didn't want it to cost me money to do it. I knew he probably didn't have a lot of money to fork over at the last minute for this project, so I just wanted some gas money to cover the cost of me driving back and forth to Lincoln. Mark offered me 50.00 for gas money. I drove 300 miles so that wasn't even going to cover it, but I agreed. Unfortunately I'm one seriously broke guy, having been hit with 10's of thousands of dollars in medical bills from my wife getting breast cancer recently.
Well, I'm driving on fumes to get there on Thursday so I ask Mark if he has any of the 50.00 for gas he promised, for me, since I had no money for gas. I get the look of someone that really doesn't want to give me anything and he says "Do you really need that now", and he pulls out a 10.00 bill and gives it to me. Wow.. that made me feel real good. I should have taken that as a sign right there.
So over the next few days, I get only 3 or 4 hours of sleep, the rest of the time is spent contributing to promoting his event by producing these videos. I work my a$$ off getting these videos edited and uploaded Thursday and Friday. Sat comes and I pull him aside and ask him if he has the other 40.00. He blows me off and says he'll get back to me in a bit. A few hours later, and several conversations with him, he still hadn't make any effort to pay me, I asked for it again and he blew me off again, saying in a few minutes. Another couple of hours later and several times I stood next to him, he has said nothing about it.
Well, I'm not stupid, it was clear he didn't want to pay me and I wasn't going to beg for it. So I packed up my equipment and left. I was pissed off, since I didn't even have money to eat that day, I had thrown my last 20 in the tank.
So in the end, I worked 14 hour days before the event, so I could take the time off, I spent 6 hours and about 60.00 in gas driving back and forth to Lincoln, I spent 15 hours of staring at a computer editing the videos, spent about 30 hours looking for things to film, and got a total of about 8 hours of sleep over 3 days.
For $10.
I don't want any money from Mark, since I had mentioned what had happened in a unrelated thread a few weeks afterwards and one of our most esteemed lady posters sent me the 40.00 because she liked all the work I had done for pool in the past and felt I got screwed.
I also saw several things happen over those days, that I was uneasy with, as I am a pool fan like all the rest of you. I'll leave it at that though.
I had also tried to help by giving some feedback to Mark, since I am in touch with these forums daily and I was relaying back the posts that I was seeing on the forums about people not liking the changes made about the points to determine who won, and about all the people complaining about the PPV. I got told at one point that I was a "negative guy". I'm simply letting him know the overall tone of some threads about his event while it's in progress, so he could address it if he wished to. For that, I was being "negative".
Lastly, from Mike's post above where he says that the bankers got screwed... he says this....
If I remember right, the bankers had to pay for a rental vehicle for him to drive out there, because at the last minute he told them he didn't think his car would make it. Well, what's the banker supposed to do if the guy streaming tells him he can't make it there, a day before the event? Dig into his pockets again and fork over some more cash for things that weren't part of the deal.
My advice to TV Mike would be that... if you get involved in a event, honor what you promised. Make sure you have the equipment you say you have, make sure you can get to the event, and most of all... do not test a new service of streaming at a major event. All of these technical problems shouldn't have happened. If you use a brand new feature of Ustream, test it out ahead of time with a few test PPV's. Get a direct number of a top tier technician for Ustream, that's going to be working that night so at the first sign of a issue, you can talk to someone who can help that has the knowledge and ability to fix it.
And probably most importantly, take some classes in Customer Service skills. Whether you stream pool or any other thing, having a business takes customer service skills and I think you should see by the comments of your customers that you didn't fare to well in that department.
Like I say.... the people I feel for the most, are the nice people that made this happen in the first place... Airart1. I'm sure they took a big hit, because of a lot of things being dumped in their lap at the last second, that wasn't part of the deal. What do you do, when you went to all this work to make this event happen in Lincoln, and at the last second everyone's throwing all of these problems at you and saying "Well it's going to cost this much to fix this problem" . You really don't have a choice at that point. You have to pay or scrub the whole thing.
So what did I learn from all this? I learned that you have to be careful who you trust. A man's word should be good, and I donated a lot of my time to try and help him out and promote his event in order to put dollars in his pocket and I got stiffed for 40.00. 40 buck ain't crap when other people are having to cough up thousands, but to me, 40 bucks is a lot when you're broke. I was doing a "Behind the Scenes" for the fans, but I also saw some stuff "behind the scenes" of what Joe Customer doesn't know, that they should have the right to know.
I'm glad that Mark goes to the effort of trying to put on these type of events. I'm glad that TV Mike wants to do streaming. But when nice people try to do nice things to help you..... don't hose them. I learned my lesson, but I will still continue to do be generous with my time with other people in the pool industry.
Hopefully everyone will learn something from this and take steps to make sure they correct issues in the future, so that everyone involved in the event is satisfied in the way it went down, and the customers are happy by getting the product they paid for.
