Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [110]
Oh, yeah, and many things are not allowed until all of the Int Base org boards and postings are done. This applies to ALL INT BASE STAFF unless otherwise noted: liberties (days off); meal breaks longer than 30 minutes; canteen privileges; getting married; bonuses; having rank (all Int Base staff were demoted to a rank of “Swamper” in the year 2000. Swamper is the very lowest rank you start out with when you first join staff); Sea Org Day; promotions; Thanksgiving; Christmas; New Years; birthdays (except COB’s – bring on the gifts!); going home to berthing (if you are directly related to getting the postings or org boards done),
Back to the main story here! We were locked up in the conference room and Dave was going to come down and meet with the key execs about the music studio. It had just been redone for the fourth time and Dave wanted to go over what he found when walking through the studio that afternoon. When one of these meetings happened, you had about twenty people who went into a room and did not come out for hours on end. You would see COB come and go as he pleased, but the people in the room did not leave for any reason, no bathroom breaks, no snacks, nothing. When Dave left or was going to be gone for a bit, sometimes they could duck into a nearby room, grab a protein bar, take a bathroom break and go right back into the room for fear that he would return while they were gone. No one was allowed to come into a meeting once Dave had entered the room. Once he was in it was locked down, so to speak. No one came or went unless he directed it. This particular day’s meeting was to be at 3:00 p.m. in the conference room in CMO Int. This room holds about 20 people max and that was with ten sitting on one side of the table and the rest standing behind them or sitting in chairs behind those at the table. The other side of the table was for Dave. He usually sat at the table and had a set variety of items that had been placed there by his stewards before the meeting: water (a specific brand that only he drinks. No one would dare drink that same brand of water!), protein bars, ashtray, pack of Camel non-filter cigarettes, pens, paper, tape recorder (unless room is hard wired for recording, which all Int Base conference rooms are). The attendants of this meeting were the CST guys, Russ Bellin and his staff who were running projects at the Base, CMO Int execs, and Gold Execs. Annie Tidman was there as she was directly running the Music Studio re-re-re-re-renovation and up-up-grade that was currently being done.
COB came in and immediately asked who had been into the studio lately. Of course only one or two people had and even they were probably lying, so he told everybody to go and look at the main control room. The music studio was right next to CMO Int so it was a 30 second trip over there. The musicians were in there and they had a look of horror on their faces; obviously COB had been by there recently. They said that he had come in, asked some questions and left.
We returned to the conference room. After a bunch of back and forth questions and guesses from us on what was wrong, we were told by Dave that the mix board was crooked and we were all sent back to the studio control room to see what he was talking about. Okay, back in the conference room he proceeded to give us a lecture on mixing and how