Tag Archives: party planner

It was the end of a decade…

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For the last ten years, approximately a third of my work year has been dedicated to party and event planning. This week is the first time since 2014 that the annual big show is set to start and my fingerprints aren’t all over it. My feelings are unexpectedly mixed.

I’m absolutely thrilled that I haven’t needed to convince dozens of presenters that they need to do things my way. I’m ecstatic that I haven’t had to deal with months of schedule changes and wanna be primadonnas making absurd demands over every detail. I’m incredibly grateful that I haven’t had to spend time discussing the best way to lay out tens of thousands of square feet of circus tents, how best to remove light poles from the parking lot, what live bands we can get for three consecutive nights of social extravaganzas, or whether it’s strictly legal for the US Government to host a whiskey tasting and cigar bar as part of an industry engagement event. 

I won’t need to figure out the inevitable chaos of registration and check in. The moment something goes wonky with the live stream won’t be my problem. I won’t be fielding complaints from people in the audience who have an outsized sense of their own importance because they’re an Executive Vice President of Who Cares. 

I’m not going to get a panicked Teams message that the bathroom is flooding. I won’t spend the night dreading the possibility that the whole tent complex could blow down if a reasonably strong thunderstorm happens to pass through the area. 

There’s nothing about that that doesn’t feel good. 

There is, however, a small part of me that will miss being a minor shot caller this week (Mostly because number of bosses who wanted their name associated with this mess was always very limited). I’ll miss working closely with some of the key players without whom the whole effort would collapse. I might even miss the sense of barely hidden mayhem and chaos that could break out at any second during a live event.

It’s just as well that this experience has passed to others this year. I’m not at all sure I’d have been in the mental or physical headspace to give it the level of attention it needs way back when planning kicked off in the fall.

I wish the team leading this ongoing, multi-year hot mess the very best of successes. I hope they knock it out of the park… if only so people will stop thinking my name is somehow inextricably linked with this particular Big Show. This week is going to feel just a little bit weird, but then I guarantee I’ll be 100% pleased as punch to have the thing be someone else’s problem. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Operating one man down. The bosses don’t want to acknowledge in any meaningful way that we’re a man down – working at 66.6% strength with 100% of the day-to-day work they still think should be happening. Of course, that’s before whatever additional surprise “hey you” random shit and odd jobs come oozing in over the side on any given day. There might have been a time I’d work myself into a nervous breakdown trying to keep up, but let me assure you those days are long gone. The wheels will come off where they come off and I won’t lose a minute of sleep over a slow-moving accident that management had months to avoid. 

2. Failure to accept defeat gracefully. Look, sometimes you can plan a party and due to timing or circumstances, or because people had a really shitty time at your last party, no one gives any indication of being interested in showing up. Once you’ve exhausted all the options, called in the favors, and done everything you can do to get people interested, you really only have two options when you’re three weeks out and only have a score of people signed up. You either cancel things in a controlled, methodical way that creates the illusion of some reason other than you couldn’t convince anyone to come to your party, or you accept that you’re doing $100,000 of planning to put on a show in an empty auditorium. Either way. At least no one will be able to say I didn’t warn them.

3. Broken encryption. We have a group mailbox in which I spend half my time working. For the last six months or more, though, the encryption certificates for that mailbox have been invalid, so any time someone sends us an encrypted email, we have to stop what we’re doing and ask them to either send it unencrypted or send it to our personal mailbox. Then, sign off the group mailbox, sign into our own, and forward the message. It’s not hard, but it’s a time suck and fucks with the basic workflow of the day. The fix to this is an easy one, just requiring us to forward some paperwork over to the IT trolls. We’ve raised it to management on more than one occasion… but bosses being bosses have decided that they don’t want to do that because they have a “better way.” It’s one goddamned simple fix to make life in this cubicle hell marginally better, but it’s too hard to do. It’s about to become my newest workplace obsession and I’ll be talking about it in every forum possible until it gets fixed, I retire, or they fire my ass.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 30 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. So, we’re still grinding along with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 30 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. The reward for “good work.” Why is it the boss never stops by and says something like “hey, I see you’ve been busier than a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest, so we’re going to take some of that workload off your plate.” No. It’s always, “Hey, I know you’ve been busy as shit so as a reward for not fucking that up, we’re going to hand you another giant turd of a project that you’re going to abso-fucking-lutely hate because planning parties and events was never supposed to be part of your portfolio. Fuck my life. I really do need to dust off the old resume and see if anyone’s in the market for a surly middle-aged battle captain.

3. Personal comfort. Comfort is, almost by definition, subjective. If, let’s say, you’re one of four or five hundred people sitting in an auditorium, chances are you won’t be perfectly comfortable. You may be too hot or too cold depending on a lot of factors including where you’re sitting, where the vents are located, what you’re wearing, and how much body heat we need to dissipate or account for over the course of the day. I know some people think they’re special by virtue of their rank, or title, or who they work for, but the thing is, I nearly universally don’t care about any of those things. But hey, feel free to complain to me. Complain to the guys running check in. Complain to the guys in the sound booth. Complain to my senior rater’s senior rater if it makes you feel at all better. But I’m still not going to crank the heat up to 78 degrees and make everyone else in the room suffer when all you needed to do was put on a damned sweater.

A week with business developers…

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I’ve spent the vast majority of my working week so far surrounded by “business developers.” Their mission in life seems to be hanging about being overly cheerful and engaging while trying to drive their hand into Uncle’s pocket as deeply as possible.

That’s fine. In theory at least. Everyone has a job to do and I don’t begrudge them for it. On the other hand, it puts me squarely in the middle of a room full of committed extroverts. The roar of them chattering during every break, the rush to the front in hopes of getting 2 or 3 minutes of face time with the most recent presenter, and their rank indifference to any civilized concept of personal space makes it an appalling experience.

In fact, the whole spectacle is exactly what I imagine my own personal hell would be like – loud, full of people, and entirely undignified. It’s exactly the kind of day I’d design if the intent was to set every nerve I’ve got on edge. Surely I’d starve if it were how I was forced to earn my salt.

At no time of year do I long for the dulcet tones of a dog snoring, or of reverential quiet of the region’s great antiquarian book shops, or the pop of the tonic cap before mixing it with a quality gin, more so than I do right now. The world of endless noise, grasping, and circular small talk is one for which I am constitutionally unsuited.

This is how it ends for me (probably)…

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I’ve managed to avoid the Great Plague for the last three years. Staying home and avoiding crowded places wasn’t exactly a radical departure from my normal lifestyle. Still, I’m sure that was the secret to my success at entirely missing a dread virus that ripped around the world leaving millions dead in its wake.

If I’m going to at long last be brought low by whatever COVID variant is now quietly circulating out there, I’m entirely sure I’m now deeply ensconced in the petri dish that will give it to me. I’m sitting here with up to 700 assholes who just couldn’t wait to show up and hang out in an auditorium breathing stagnant air while some other bunch of assholes reads them slides word for word for 8 hours a day across three successive days.

What reptilian brain fuckery drives people to want to show up and sit around when the information could be entirely available on a basic website or, gods forbid, through an online meeting, I will never, ever understand. As far as I’m concerned, the “human element” is entirely overrated.

This is the classic meeting that could have been an email writ extraordinarily large.

Rehearsal week…

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If it’s possible, rehearsal week can be more awful than the actual production. It’s the week when everyone realizes they haven’t been paying enough attention as the big muscle movements take place during the planning process. They find, to their surprise, that all the major decisions have already been taken.

Rehearsals are for refining the concept – not for building something new from whole cloth. I’ll spend a large portion of this week digging in my heels, denying what would have been simple requests a month ago, and generally being an obstinate asshole. Sure, there are some who could, by applying enough pressure among the right people, force me to shift… but very few are going to be willing to exert that kind of effort.

One of the most important lessons of how to be a successful bureaucrat is learning how to say no. Sometimes you have to say it with honey dipped words. Other times you have to say it with claws out. Still, you have to learn to say it to friend and foe alike – and you have to learn how to make it stick.

This will be my annual week of saying no to almost everyone. It won’t win me any new friends, but I’ll drag this rank, festering boondoggle across the finish line. Once that’s done, no one much cares how often you had to tell then no.

Two week warning…

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We’re two weeks out. It’s the time of year when I should be approaching caffeine poisoning or have my blood pressure trending towards stroke territory. And yet as I sit here, I’m feeling mostly swaddled in a calm indifference.

By the time this week ends, I’ll have done 80% of everything that’s doable within my span of control to attempt pulling this circus off without too many problems. By the time next week ends, I’ll have spooled out 90% of my effort. The final 10% will burn off across three days from the 25th through the 27th. Very little of what happens during those three days will have anything at all to do with me.

By that point, I’ve given you the stage, gotten people ticketed, fought with dozens of people about getting their presentations delivered in something like a timely manner, and attended to all manner of details both petty and large. What I can’t do, though, is make everyone happy. Attendees will be mad that they’re not getting coffee and cookies, briefers will be mad that we don’t have the mic they really like, senior leaders of every stripe will be visited by the good idea fairy a few hours before show time and want to change everything.

But next week, this ponderous beast begins taking on a life of its own. As the clock runs down, the series of events begins that we’re all individually unable to stop. By then the best we can do is attempt to nudge events back towards the right path and let them flow through to their illogical end.

At this point, stepping out one more time to the edge of the precipice, all I know for certain is that in two weeks the circus will be in town. Some of it will go well. Some of it will not. And then it will be over. After that we’ll all spend six months forgetting that we have to do it all again for 2024.

Now is the spring of my discontent…

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And so it begins. The two weeks a year when I’m forced to put on a brave face and transform into a cheerleader, a producer, a confessor, a circus roustabout, a tyrant, and a Chatty Cathy all in the name of passing along some information that could just as easily be set loose into the world by putting it on a website.

“But that misses the personal touch,” they cry. Knowing how much money you’re going to spend and how isn’t enough. We can’t do without the networking, the back slapping, the crab puffs, and little finger sandwiches. Though they’ll howl just as loudly when we go back to charging $700 a head instead of giving the information away for free online.

COVID and the Plague Era has given me a great respite in that at least the last few iterations of this great dog and pony show have been online. No vast sea of party tents, no outdoor equipment displays, no tickets, no 700 extra people jammed elbow to asshole in an auditorium to listen to presentations they could have heard just as easily from home. Next year might be back to “normal”… and that’s a threat that hangs over me like a goddamned death sentence.

My philosophy of meetings…

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A big part of my philosophy of project management can be distilled down to one simple rule: Never have a meeting when an email will do. I conservatively estimate that on any given project that eliminates approximately 95% of meetings that otherwise would have taken place. 

There’s a catch, of course. Periodically, the Gods on Olympus sneak into their questions about the status of whatever project interests them in the moment an inquiry like “When was the last meeting on this?” I can tell you from experience that the answer they’re not looking for is, “Uh, I think we had a meeting about three months ago.” 

It won’t matter to them that you’ve got full command of all the pertinent information. It won’t matter that you’ve checked in weekly or even more often with all the people developing content and know that everything is on track. The only thing that will matter is that you haven’t had a meeting. You’ll never convince me that this minor obsession with meetings isn’t one of the big driving influences of why so many bosses are still hellbent on putting asses in cubes. Then, not only can they ask if meetings are happening, they can walk past and see people crowded into a conference room – pure management bliss.

Even though it’s not strictly necessary, I’ve been running a meeting once a month since before the new year. At least that way I can say with a straight face we’ve had meetings. Now that we’re closing in on the curtain going up, I’ve switched it to weekly meetings – because inside the 30-day window Olympian interest can become intense. At least I can tell them that, yes sir, of course we met on that just a few days ago and be 100% honest.

What I won’t mention, of course, is that these weekly meetings never take more than 20 minutes. In fact, today’s lasted a grand total of 21 minutes and conveyed exactly three new bits of information that I’d already sent out this morning by email. We’d have put up a better time but there were one or two technical snags that cost precious seconds.

But, by God, now we’ve had a meeting about it and nothing makes officialdom happier than knowing there was a meeting. I’ll shoot to get next week’s down to sub-15 minutes times. I feel like that level of success is really within my reach.

The eighth time around…

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This morning I was granted official permission from the gods on Olympus to begin preliminary planning for the annually reoccurring piece of this job that I hate the most. Yay.

Putting a six month long planning process that stretches across a dozen different organizations, nearly a hundred separate contacts, and relies on offering a happy, welcoming face to our partners from the private sector into the hands of a well known introvert and misanthrope feels like the height of bureaucratic folly. It’s the kind of thing I’d intuitively want to give to someone who didn’t unflinchingly use the phrases “wedding planner,” “circus roustabout,”, and “welcoming the great unwashed masses” to describe his role even to the most senior of leaders.

But here we are. This year will be my eighth as wedding planner in charge of this particular effort. Years ago the bosses promised “just one more year” and we’ll get someone else to do it. They don’t even bother with those lies now… so I guess it’s eight down and thirteen more to go… unless I manage to cock it up in some truly spectacular and unanticipated manner. I’m not one to go in for sabotage, but I’m told that accidents happen, so a boy can dream.

That happy dream notwithstanding, I’ll get it done on time and to standard, but don’t think for a moment that I’ll be enjoying any of what I must do these next six months. It’ll be a product not done for love or pride of a job well handled, but purely because I enjoy getting paid every two weeks and would like nothing to interfere with that continuing well into the future. Nothing more, nothing less.

One of my best friends from college had a simple sign in his dorm room. It said “You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.” On such words, whole careers are built.