Crisis Averted!

My word, it’s been a long time. There are two principal reasons for not updating ye olde blog for so long; firstly, I’ll be frank here; I am a bone-idle, procrastinating waster who wishes he was still back at university where he could get away with it. It’s amazing that I’ve written as much of this blog as I have. And secondly- well, there hasn’t been an awful lot to write about…

All any of us at Halden Theatre have really been doing in the last couple of weeks is eagerly monitoring the submissions inbox, watching as the stream of beautiful new plays trickles in. Until today. Today we narrowly avoided a disaster of apocalyptic proportions, which very nearly put both myself and Daniel into cardiac arrest. Here is the tale.

This morning at about 4:30 AM I received a phonecall from a couple of rowdy, drunken individuals of my acquaintance (who shall remain nameless*). I hung up almost instantly, put my phone to silent and went back to sleep. When I got up I neglected to put it back to normal- and when I glanced at it around 3PM, I saw that I has 4 missed calls from Daniel (our esteemed Artistic Director), along with an ominous text message, which read something like, ‘Slight crisis, my computer is ****ed, ergo we may have lost all submissions and not be able to recover new ones’.  A ‘slight’ crisis, you say?

I was over in a flash with my dusty, trusty laptop to attempt to salvage this appalling situation. Turns out that Daniel was being a little dramatic (his prerogative, one might say), and that while his computer, which was storing all our submissions to date, had more or less given up the ghost, said submissions were backed up online. Still, this hiccup had scared the daylights out of me, and after downloading the backed up files I immediately saved them to my laptop, then my memory stick. A team of monks are currently transcribing them on parchment to be stored in a chest in my attic.

So, MASSIVE sigh of relief. I’ve been made temporary guardian and steward of the submissions until Daniel’s computer is fixed, so all current and subsequent stageplays are mercifully safe.

On a totally different note, the deadline for Triliteral submissions is 12 noon on February 28th- so, If you fancy the chance to have your work performed by professionals at a public venue, you’d better get cracking! Just over a week to go- what are you waiting for??

* Elizabeth Louise O’Brien and Samantha Claire Searle, both of London.