\n<\/p>\n
Recently we heard from people who work events about their horror stories and triumphs \u2013 and here are my 10 favorite stories they shared.<\/p>\n
1. Applause<\/strong><\/p>\n I was part of a round of lightning talks. The event organizers told us we each had five minutes, and for enforcement they asked the audience to cheer violators off the stage.<\/p>\n My work was done in 90 seconds because I’m good that way.<\/p>\n However, CISO “Blowhard Bob” liked his own voice and did not believe in the deadlines imposed on him. When the applause started, he was able to complete his slide halfway. He tried to talk it out by being Blowhard Bob, but the audience applauded until he had no choice but to leave the stage.<\/p>\n When he came out of the venue, I saw his thunderous face. I never liked Blowhard Bob, so it was a bummer to see him get so needlessly angry.<\/p>\n 2. Secret entry<\/strong><\/p>\n I’m a vegetarian at a company that frequently hosts customers or suppliers (on the order of 100+ per week) for all-day meetings, where they get stuck a lot and are unable to get their food. A large number of our visitors are also vegetarian\/vegan. I have the privilege of bringing my own food, but visitors cannot do so.<\/p>\n There is almost never a vegetarian option in our lunch. There are options at every location we offer, but hosts never choose just one. I tried for a year to get hosts to add a vegetarian option, but for unknown reasons it’s impossible to ask.<\/p>\n Finally, I appealed to my network admin friend to grant me backdoor access to the catering request website. Every Monday, my good thing for the week is to log in and edit each new catering form to include a vegan option. The hosts often make noises of surprise when they find themselves with a tray of vegetarian food (and take credit for it when it comes in handy), but no one tries to figure out how it happens. It’s been 2 years now since I implemented my little act of goodwill.<\/p>\n 3. Nature Soundtrack<\/strong><\/p>\n Each year, Big Corporation would honor retired 25-year employees with a fancy dinner and dance at an expensive venue. The location chosen that year was an exclusive brand new hotel, and the company was excited to be able to show it off and themselves.<\/p>\n As guests arrive at the lounge for drinks, the oohs and ahhs about luxury appointments suddenly stop as piped-in music begins to sound. Tradition held that the music chosen for cocktail hour should be Top 40 hits from the year these people started working at the company, but the intern in charge of assembling the playlist decided that because the large new hotel displaced a wetland, the recorded sounds of a swamp, including croaking frogs and chirping crickets, filled the cocktail lounge. People were confused because he had a crystal champagne flute in his hand.<\/p>\n 4. Medical simulation<\/strong><\/p>\n One year, we invited a medical simulation team (similar to emergency simulation, but for medical events) to present at a nursing conference I ran. What they didn’t tell us was that the simulation they were running would involve copious amounts of fake blood – which flowed in several different places, including on people sitting in the front row. I think the venue started charging us for carpet cleaning too.<\/p>\n 5. Grape Kool-Aid and Swans<\/strong><\/p>\n At a corporate headquarters complex preparing for a July 4 outdoor concert and fireworks, that summer was extremely dry, and fireworks displays required special permits and pre-show requirements to prevent grass fires.<\/p>\n Coincidentally, due to the drought the complex’s ponds and fountains were attracting huge flocks of Canada geese. Did you know that goose poop is the size of a small dog poop? Before hundreds of families were ready to spread out their blankets for a picnic on the lawn before the concert, a large quantity of swan dudu had to be removed and it was said that the swans needed to be reassured not to return until 5 July. The two-pronged approach was to bring in border collies to scare away the chickens and then spray copious amounts of grape flavored Kool Aid powder, as that would surely send the geese back to Canada (they hate one of the ingredients). Fortunately, the problem with this plan was realized before the day of the concert when the landscape crew was watering the lawn as required in compliance with the fire marshal’s instructions.<\/p>\n 6. Miniature Statues<\/strong><\/p>\n Several years ago, I worked at a nonprofit where we spent all day, doing hard (rewarding) work with kids every day. Once a year, we had a fundraising event that revolved around Lagos. We had over 1000 people (kids and adults) come and pay to do LEGO activities with us.<\/p>\n That year, there was an add in fundraiser where you make a minifig (mini figurines) scavenger hunt type thing – join a session, help find the minifig and pick one to take home with you. For budget reasons, they were knockoff minifigs. They were things like a Spiderman head on a construction worker’s body with purple and pink legs. Randomly put together the pieces that came in a giant grab bag.<\/p>\n In the second season of the scavenger hunt, did someone point out that some of them were apparently historical figure minifigs? And someone gave me one and I looked carefully… Huh, it had a red armband and double lightning bolts.<\/p>\n Nonsense. Off-brand Lego knockoffs offer minifigs for historical dioramas and apparently if you get the “grab bag”, they have Nazis mixed with superheroes.<\/p>\n We set things off for a few minutes so we can panic and find all the hidden minifigs. They were replaced with “safe” figs, and we had a poor staff person spend the rest of the day sifting through aggressive and non-aggressive minifigs, keeping us one session ahead of the scheduled scavenger hunt. As far as we know, no Nazis were sent home with children.<\/p>\n Apparently the organization now only uses official minifigs for LEGO events.<\/p>\n 7. Cast Wrap Party<\/strong><\/p>\n The catering company I worked for was hired to cater the series wrap party for Game of Thrones. All the stars were there and most of us caterers were fans of the show, so we were excited to be there. At night itself we wondered why the energy in the room seemed so low and strangely dim.<\/p>\n Then of course, the final season came out a few months later and we got it.<\/p>\n 8. Invitation<\/strong><\/p>\n I worked in higher education development at an institution where fellows had strongly opposed the appointment of a professional fundraiser and instead appointed a senior fellow in history as director of development \u2013 \u200b\u200ba charming man but not a fundraiser at all. This manifested itself in many ways, but perhaps the best was an event we held to thank a major donor who contributed a significant amount. We booked a good venue, arranged for some catering, briefed the team members before the event, arrived on the day and waited. And waited. And waited some more. DD had one job, to invite donors; He didn’t do that.<\/p>\n I left soon after.<\/p>\n 9. Chickens<\/strong><\/p>\n I run a small performing arts venue that hosts over 200 performances\/events per year. Here’s a recent favorite story that exemplifies the awkwardness of running a public event venue, despite low risk and neither complete disaster nor victory.<\/p>\n We had a program that was a collaboration between two very large, community-focused performance groups. There are strictly no pets allowed in our venue except for licensed service animals and pre-approved on-stage animals policy. One of the cast had a service dog that came to the venue. This was fine. But countless other artists were not clearly told that it was a service dog. Suddenly, the next day, several other members of the cast came with their dogs and were very upset when we asked them to take them home. The next day there was a public performance and as the audience began to arrive, a man came in with a hard-sided cat carrier. Imagine my surprise when I came closer and found that it contained two chickens! Turns out his wife was at the show and wanted a photo in costume with their pet chickens. She had told her husband to wait outside for her, but he ignored this fact and behaved quite rudely when we asked him to do so. So here I am, running all over the building, trying to figure out whose chickens these were and having to explain over and over again that no, I wasn’t kidding. Yes, chickens. And then my staff kept pulling me aside and saying, “Umm… there’s a guy with chickens in the lobby?”<\/p>\n It all worked out – they went out and took a photo of their chickens and then the husband and the chickens went home and they were never free range at our place… but it becomes a running joke whenever things go wrong: take care of the chickens!<\/p>\n 10. teen<\/strong><\/p>\n I used to raise money for walk events and we usually had a grab bag of random volunteers to help run the event. One year, this older teenage boy, assigned by his mother as part of a community service requirement (I think he was working on traffic tickets) was assigned to my area.<\/p>\n This kid was only supposed to be there for a short shift of a few hours and since I’m sure this wasn’t his first choice of how to spend a Saturday, I wasn’t expecting too much. He became one of the last people to leave the site, he worked eight or nine hours and moved a lot of stuff around and did a very good job of everything we asked him to do, all on a very hot day. He said that they had a great time and that they really enjoyed themselves. I always wondered if that day was the beginning of his eventing career.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently we heard from people who work events about their horror stories and triumphs \u2013 and here are my 10 favorite stories they shared. 1. Applause I was part of a round of lightning talks. The event organizers told us we each had five minutes, and for enforcement they asked the audience to cheer violators<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[9291,14296,537,890,2884,8031,4581],"class_list":["post-34471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-daily-bread","tag-aggressive","tag-applause","tag-food","tag-program","tag-secret","tag-stories","tag-workers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34471"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34472,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34471\/revisions\/34472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christiancorner.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}