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La actuación decepcionó al público; por si fuera poco, el sonidista cometió un error.

La actuación decepcionó al público; por si fuera poco, el sonidista cometió un error.
The performance disappointed the audience; as if that weren't enough, the sound technician made a mistake.
From Lesson 426:Additive connectors (es más, encima)·Spanish (Latin America)

Questions & Answers about La actuación decepcionó al público; por si fuera poco, el sonidista cometió un error.

How does por si fuera poco work here, and why does it use the subjunctive?
Por si fuera poco translates to "as if that weren't enough" or "to top it off." It's an additive connector used for argumentative escalation—meaning it introduces a final, usually negative point that makes an already bad situation even worse. It uses fuera, the imperfect subjunctive of ser, because it literally proposes a hypothetical scenario: "in the event that [what just happened] were [considered] little."
Does decepcionó mean the performance tricked or deceived the audience?
No, decepcionar is a classic false friend for English speakers. It means "to disappoint." If you want to say "to deceive" or "to trick," you would use a verb like engañar. Here, the performance simply let the audience down.
Why is there an al before público? Is that the personal "a"?
Yes! The verb decepcionar requires the preposition a before the person being disappointed. Even though público (audience/public) is a collective noun, it represents a group of people, so it still takes the personal a. Since público is masculine singular, a + el combines into al.
Why do we say cometió un error instead of hizo un error?
In Spanish, you generally don't "make" or "do" a mistake using the verb hacer. The natural collocation (words that commonly go together) is cometer un error (literally, "to commit an error"). You'll also see cometer used for crimes and fouls, such as cometer un delito (to commit a crime).
Is sonidista feminine because it ends in -a?
Not necessarily. Words ending in the suffix -ista, which usually denote professions or beliefs, have the exact same form for both masculine and feminine. A male sound technician is el sonidista and a female sound technician is la sonidista. The article el in this sentence tells us that this specific technician is male.

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