Sometimes opportunities fall into your lap and you have no choice but to run with them. Coachella was one of these opportunities that ended up falling into my lap. I have always loved music festivals, with the first big one I attended being Bonnaroo in 2017. But Coachella? If you had asked me two weeks before Coachella if I would ever attend, I would have laughed in your face. As a broke college student, the cost is completely unrealistic for me, and the influencer-soaked content that comes out during Coachella was a big turn off.
“It’s just not my kind of festival,” I would have told you, even though we would both know the lineup this past year was wicked good.
So when my friend’s roommate, Ashley Parke, finished working the first weekend of Coachella and told me that they were extremely understaffed, I immediately volunteered to work. Ashley is now a senior at Chapman University and she explained that she’d been working for a company that works VIP experiences at festivals, sporting events, and concerts. She was a golf cart driver for a VIP campground at Coachella called Safari Campgrounds. I told her I was very interested and she put me in contact with her supervisor. My good friend, Olivia Anderson, decided to come and work with me as well.
Ashley got me and Olivia in contact with her supervisor, and--after a little phone tag-- we were
officially hired to work weekend two. We experienced a wide variety of challenges. The on-boarding forms were confusing, and the communications between us and our supervisors were lacking, and we were scheduled at two different locations that were 45 minutes apart the first day. Not only this, but when we tried to get our credentials, which included our staff wristbands and staff camping pass, they had not been added to the system. Eager to see Harry Styles after a long day of anxiety and excitement, we were quite disappointed when the roll call tent closed before we were given our camping pass (we did get our staff wristbands at least). We had no way of getting into the festival and no place to sleep unless we got one of those passes. We eventually managed to get a pass from other employees leaving the site, however we encountered even more issues later on. It was somewhere between midnight and one A.M. and police had shut down all of the roads around the festival. Even if the roads had been open, our supervisor never communicated where we were supposed to park. We had to drive around the outside of the festival asking event staff and police to help us, with many of them having no answer for us. After some time I started to cry again, and a police officer took pity on us, giving us an escort through the festival to a parking lot. It ended up being the wrong parking lot, but bless his heart anyway. We decided to just go ahead and park there and sprinted across the festival grounds to catch the last few minutes of Harry Styles' set.
After his set, we still could not find our staff camping lot so we gave up and parked my car in front of a random house in the town near the grounds and slept in the back of my car. We eventually woke up around 5 A.M., three hours after we had gone to sleep, we drove to a nearby Starbucks to cry some more. We changed and brushed our teeth in the Starbucks bathroom. While there we finally got a detailed picture of a hand drawn map. We were able to find Staff Lot D and pulled into the lot and danced for so long that the men working the gate started laughing.
That Saturday morning, we had our first day of on-site work. We ended up getting terribly lost trying to walk to the campground we were working, wandering around inside the grounds of the festival despite it not being open for the day yet. In the distance, we could hear Megan Thee Stallion running through her soundcheck. One of our coworkers found us and took us back to the campground in a golf cart. Olivia and I adjusted into our new positions, and for the first time I let myself breathe. Despite the heat and the dust, I enjoyed driving people around on a golf-cart behind the stages of the festival.
Even with all of the stress and tears, I can wholeheartedly say it was worth every second. We entered the festival after our shifts ended and were able to watch Steve Lacy from the VIP section. We ate delicious meals in the staff catering tent. We met all kinds of people who had traveled from all over the country just to work the festival. We had production-level staff wristbands which granted us access to all VIP areas and most artist areas. To top it all off, while taking a bathroom break in one of the artist sections, we ended up meeting Kevin Abstract, Matt Champion and Bearface from the musical group Brockhampton.
Olivia happened to be one of their biggest fans, and still is.
So what did I learn from spontaneously working Coachella weekend two? I’ll give you a list.
Say yes to stuff that makes you a little nervous.
It is okay to not always know what to expect.
After a shitshow, there will be a rainbow.
Working festivals can be a lot more fun than just attending them, (this depends on the festival and your situation obviously.)
Finally, to quote my man Justin Bieber - never say never.
See you next year, Coachella.