Suspicious activity

Well, that was an adventure.

For several months now I’ve been taking some extra sound equipment to IV every Friday to augment the sound system IV owns. I borrowed the church’s old sound board, which has been floating around since it was replaced several years ago (and by old I mean 1979 vintage). That, as well as several other large parts of the church’s system, came from the original church sound guy who used to run sound systems for concerts and such. He happened to have a spare snake in his garage. (For those unfamiliar with the term, let me clarify that a sound snake is a long, thick cable that carries a dozen or more microphone signals a long distance, with a bunch of connectors on each end. The snake in question is 50-75 feet long and has 12 inputs and 4 outputs.)

The problem with IV’s system is that the mics have to plug directly into the mixer, which has to be right up front below the stage. This means that I have a hard time hearing what’s coming out of the speakers to be able to mix it well. I’ve wanted for a while to remedy the situation, and it was only recently that the pieces all fell into place. I now run the snake from the stage up to the back, where I set up the borrowed mixer. The mics go through the snake into the board, where I can mix from the comfort of the back row, and the results go back down the snake to the old all-in-one mixer, which is now functioning simply as an amplifier. The other advantage of this arrangement is that I now have more auxiliary outputs, meaning I can control my recordings better (two channel recording, etc.).

In addition to those large items, I also borrow a bunch of mic cables and several direct boxes (to connect guitars to the mic cables). The latter aren’t all spares, so I have to grab them after worship team practice on Tuesday and return them on Sunday morning. I have IV small group Thursday nights, so lately I’ve been dropping by church on the way home to pick up these things. This week, however, I forgot about it and went straight home. So, once I got all my stuff inside, I headed back out.

This is where it gets interesting. As I drove in the driveway, I looked through the windows of the sanctuary and saw that there were some lights on in one of the classrooms in the next wing over. I figured somebody had just left them on by accident, but just in case I thought I’d drive around the end of the parking lot to make sure there wasn’t somebody like the pastor parked on the other side of the building, out of sight. Then, as I entered the parking lot, I noticed a flash of light from a car driving past, like a spotlight. This, also, I thought was a bit strange, but I continued on. Nobody was in the lot, so I circled back and parked in front of the sanctuary door. Walking over to the door, I turned to see a car zipping up the driveway. That was even more weird. Who else would be here at 11 PM? Regardless, I turn back to the door and begin to insert the key.

Then the car stopped and a guy called to me. I turned around, and realized it was a police car. He asked what I was doing, and I clumsily replied that I was borrowing some sound equipment, because I ran the sound system. I didn’t really understand what he wanted at first. I started to ask, “Is everything all right?” He got out, directed me to keep my hands where he could see them, and asked a bunch of questions. One of the first was whether I had ID. I paused momentarily, smacked my forehead, and replied that “I’m sorry, I don’t.” You see, I keep my wallet in my backpack, which goes everywhere with me at RIT. But I had taken it out when I got home, and forgotten to bring it on the one occasion when it mattered. He asked more questions. I tried to answer that I was allowed to be there, that I had a key, and that I was even listed in the church directory. He said that there had been a number of church break-ins in the area recently, so he wanted to see if I was trying to break in.

He asked me to get in his car. He looked up my driver’s license information and the car registration on his laptop. he asked where I lived, who else lived there, where I worked, and so on. He asked the dispatcher to look up contact info for the church. I chimed in with the street address, since he didn’t know the number. They couldn’t find anything, though. I tried to be helpful and tell him whatever he wanted to know. He got out and looked in my car. Then he came back in, and I suggested contacting the pastor or secretary. I provided him with the pastor’s name, and had the dispatcher look him up in the phone book and call him. A few minutes later, we heard back that I was clear to be there. So, he let me out, thanked me for being cooperative, and warned me to keep my ID with me at all times. “At least you’ll have a story to tell,” he said. Then I went in, completed my mission, and headed home. (I noticed that I was shaking a little as I started driving.)

After I went to bed, I went back over the experience in my head. I thought about it from his perspective and wondered what else I could have told him to help verify my identity. It’s his job to not trust me, so I’d have to suggest outside sources. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, so I had nothing to hide, and I was rather calm through it all, which probably worked in my favor. I wondered if when I said I was “borrowing” sound equipment he might have thought, “Yeah, right, more like stealing it.” I also wondered if my surreptitious check of the parking lot might have looked suspicious (if he even saw that). I stayed awake far longer than I wanted to, and eventually got to sleep after 1.

I had on previous occasions wondered what the neighbors might think if they saw me at church late at night and bringing things out. This is the most convenient time for me to do it, but I may want to consider doing it on Friday morning so as to avoid drawing this kind of attention.

Update: After church on Sunday, Pastor told us his side of the story. He got a call from someone who said, “Hello, this is Officer So-and-so.” Now, whenever you get a call from the police you get scared and wonder if someone died or something. But no, they said, “We’ve got a guy here who’s trying to get into the church. He’s got a key, and we wanted to find out if he’s supposed to be there.” “Who is it?” “It’s a guy named Tim Peterson.” “That tall, lanky guy? Oh, he’s all right.” And that was that. He then said, “That was the strangest call I’ve ever gotten. I’ve never gotten a call like that before.”

Update: That mischievous family I work with to run sound at church, after being involved in the above conversation, took it upon themselves to cull some pictures from the church photo gallery and… modify them. Not quite up to my usual standards, but they’ll do…

“These exclusive pictures show the tragedy of what happens when a fine young man turns to the dark side…”

Tim the jailbird runs the prison sound system

Tim the jailbird at hard labor

What, oh what can we do about Tim the jailbird?