The Rest of the Story

- yesterday morning, when the sponsored breakfast for the whole conference involved a skit for which they forced first-time attendees from the audience to participate in front of everyone.

We had to be a bunch of hungover fur trappers doing "YMCA" karaoke. Maybe you had to be there.

Yesterday there was a bunch of other stuff too, and today was the big day (for me anyway) with the high-profile events, and they went off flawlessly, but I am not claiming credit because the hotel staff here TOTALLY ROCKS, I am so serious, omigod you guys, you would not EVEN believe how awesome they are.

Omigod.

But you know, it's all over and I feel kind of let down. We've been working full-time on this since I started the new job. And now I will not be working with the host city contact anymore, or this hotel, and oh I don't know, it's kind of depressing. Unfortunately the dinner/dance (which the host city planned) quieted way down very early. Everybody's just exhausted, I think. I partied more last night. But the hospitality suite opens at midnight and I plan to go back down. And I did manage to get some dancing in, after making sure that the videographer had gone off duty.

It'll be good to go home tomorrow, and I don't think I'll go to Eeyore's this weekend, OR the Georgetown Red Poppy Festival, which those of you in the South Dallas region definitely need to check out; one of the coolest people in the world is involved in planning it and I bet it'll be awesome, maybe even as awesome as the staff of this hotel. Which, ooh! That reminds me! I met Robbie's coworker at the Travel Fair and she seems really cool, a very cute redhead (gentlemen prefer blondes, but Robbie apparently likes redheads better) but I was so exhausted I totally forgot to say "Psssha" to her. Honestly, it's the way I am after this week, I need to buy some peroxide.

See, they got a DJ downstairs who doesn't know how to read the crowd, is a big part of the problem. Anyway I will probably go back down and maybe wheedle another drink ticket out of my dear friend the CVB contact whom I may never see again (sniffle).

On the other hand, it is a Hawaiian luau-themed party, so yes: I have gotten leid while attending this conference. Thank you.

It's night. I'm never tired at night. It's the mornings that kick my ass.

In Over My Head

The planning is complete. We're driving to Beaumont tomorrow; and that which we've forgotten, that which has fallen through the cracks, and that which will spontaneously go wrong will just have to sort itself out without any further help from me. We're done!

Well, not really. We'll be right there with pages of emergency contact information, backup plans, and Eisenhower-era CB radios in hand to fix whatever needs to be fixed if and when it breaks. Within reason. I hope none of our conference attendees suddenly die of, oh I don't know, malaria? Or perhaps alligator bites. There is not a plan for this.

A barbarian invasion would also catch us off guard.

Yesterday at lunch I went walking with Ernest, who still - amazingly - works in my old department. That poor man! And as we were strolling along the hike-and-bike, a rowing crew on the lake glided rapidly past, a drummer beating time for the oarsmen.

Ernest and I glanced at one another. "Vikings!" we chorused. "RUN!!!"

The only thing left to do is buy a couple of outfits for the conference - all of us on the planning committee dress alike, so that the attendees can spot us easily. So that's on my agenda for today. Button-down shirts and trousers - boring clothes.

With luck, I will return from Beaumont unpillaged.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Yesterday afternoon it occurred to me that poring over banquet event orders is not all that different from poring over highway construction plans. Both consist of reams upon reams of paper, filled with dry, boring specifications.

Though, unless you have a taste for bituminous flex base, banquet event orders are more apt to make you hungry.

Did you know that, these days (I haven't done meeting planning in several years), it's standard for a hotel to charge you extra to have the electrical outlets in your meeting room activated? We're paying $35 per room per day for it, and I'll bet you that's cheap.

Planning meetings will warp your sense of what things should cost. I've paid $3.95 for a can of soda or $18/person for a light continental breakfast and not thought twice about it. There's also a surcharge of 20% on everything, written into the contract, "to ensure the quality of the service of hotel staff." I wasn't around when this contract was negotiated. I wonder if we could have struck that out and gotten the hotel to waive the charge in exchange for letting the waiters spit in the food? Duly initialed by both parties.

One big difference between this job and the old one is that it would actually matter if I failed to review the information carefully. This seems a bit odd, since what I'm doing now is supposedly a little more tangential to the overall mission of the agency than what I was doing before. But there it is: how important is it to maintain accurate data if people in other areas of the agency - as I've since discovered - aren't even aware that it's being maintained, and just call up a regional employee to ask them to go out and take a look at the roadway if they need the information?

Sheesh.

The banquet event orders are the dullest thing I've had to deal with yet in the new job, so it's really not so bad. It just sets my mind to wandering on hypotheticals, like do we really need electricity? I mean, really? And would it really be so awful to feed conference attendees bituminous flex base? It's one of those things everybody assumes is bad without even trying it. Kind of like demonic possession.

Fortunately, my job keeps me much too busy to come up with such seditious ideas, for a change.

Favor Curry

The best part of being a meeting planner was all the free lunches.

Actually, this is not entirely true. The free dinners were better. Fam trips (these are basically all-expenses-paid trips, including airfare and luxurious meals and accommodations, intended to familiarize meeting planners with a destination so that they will want to hold events there) were the best of all, only I never got to go because the only one I ever got invited to, in Geneva, Switzerland, was scheduled to end just three days before I was due with Anna.

She was born eight days late. I totally should have gone.

My current job is not very likely ever to send me to Europe, unless there are some fairly drastic changes in the way Texas state government is structured. But I did get taken to lunch today by some of my business contacts from Corpus, who were attending our conference in Austin. San Antonio, Atlanta (Texas, not Georgia), Pharr, Houston, and Laredo were there as well.

The guy from Laredo inexplicably reminds me of Carl Sagan. Well, it's not inexplicable that he reminds me of Carl Sagan - he looks, sounds, and acts sort of like him, and is clearly very smart - but it is a bit puzzling what a person who would remind anyone of Carl Sagan would be doing in Laredo. So I asked him; and he said he's originally from Massachusetts, and apparently just up and decided he'd like to live in Mexico City. So, in rather methodical fashion, he opted to move first to Laredo as a test environment.

But I didn't find out if he still thinks this was a good idea.

He brought a beaker of water and a PH testing kit to lunch, tested the beaker, the drinking water, and some tap water, and performed a few impromptu experiments on me and another of his tablemates. Smart guy. A little odd, maybe, but very bright people generally are. When I was a mere slip of a girl and all my classmates had ginormous crushes on Sean Cassidy (I'm dating myself here, but you know what they say about that*), I had a ginormous crush on Carl Sagan. I'm a little odd, too.

Robbie works with the guy from Houston. When Robbie and I were still very new (we started this job at the same time), Robbie called Houston to ask him a question. A secretary answered the phone. Robbie asked to speak to his contact.

"Oh, he passed away," said the secretary offhandedly.

"What?" said Robbie, taken aback.

"He's passed on," the secretary repeated.

"Oh my God. I'm sorry," Robbie exclaimed.

"Oh, it's okay," the secretary said.

Robbie hung up and told a senior coworker, who was surprised. "I just talked to him two days ago," he said, "and he didn't sound sick!"

And of course it turned out that the guy was not dead at all, and so all this time, we've just assumed the secretary was... well, a little on the transportational side. But we didn't tell this story to the guy in question until his unusually substantial and hearty-looking ghost attended the conference this week. He was puzzled, and after thinking about it for a day or two concluded that the secretary had misunderstood because someone whose first name was the same as his last name had died a couple of years before Robbie and I started this job.

I only hope she'll think it's funny that some people she's never met in Austin have assumed she was bat-shit insane for about a year and a half.

The conference is finished now, and overall I think it was a success. At the end, our supervisor lined all of us analysts up in front of what was left of the audience to thank us, and my contact from Corpus pointed to me and shouted out, "I'll take the one second from the end! How much?"

And that beats out free lunches, dinners, fam trips, and maybe even the tins of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies the sales staff at the Doubletree used to drop off in the meeting planning department where I used to work, once a month or so.

Well... maybe not the cookies.

----------------
*"You always get some when you're dating yourself!"

No Heckling. Period.

Last week I was browsing through MS Office Online to find a certificate of appreciation for the guest speakers at our conference this week.

They have customizable form letters, too, in case you're not sure what to say. Imagine my wonderment and delight when the first one I opened included a canned paragraph apologizing for the heckling. Does Microsoft have all their bases covered, or what?!*

Speaking of MS, let me pause to clarify, here, for the males among you, that PMS stands for "pre-menstrual syndrome." It's a bout of mild** hormonally-induced moodiness that hits, oh, about a week before a woman's period. So women aren't PMSing when they're actually on the rag. That would really be MSing, or as some women*** euphemistically put it, "Bill Gates is paying a visit."

We've been working on this conference for months. I used to be a corporate meeting planner, so from my perspective it seems like a lot more effort has gone into the planning - considering we aren't working with an outside venue, or caterers, or AV staff, or hotel, or extraneous dinners or entertainment - than is strictly necessary. We have a few classrooms at work reserved; the AV equipment we need is all in there; the attendees are on their own for meals, lodging, and travel; and our section director has bought coffee for everyone. What's to plan?

Of course, as a meeting planner, I was never part of the proceedings, whereas in this case I did have to come up with a presentation on one of our work processes that I'll be giving in front of about 75 people. Luckily, PMS hasn't yet convinced me that I'll suck. Then again, I attended the dry runs of everybody else's presentations, many of which were, well, dry. I tried to make mine interesting. Considering that the whole thing, including my speaker notes which I never meant anyone else to see,**** got burned to the DVD that's getting handed out to all the attendees, I may have been more successful than I intended.

So I'm up on Wednesday morning, if you want to come see me wax rhapsodic about what I do at work. But you better not heckle me, or Bill Gates will kick your ass.

-------------
*If you don't count Vista
**Your mileage may vary
***Me
****"Welcome. I am your shiny new minute order goddess. Fear not, mortals."