Some might say 13 is an unlucky number and in some ways it was. It was the 13th Summer Ball at work that I have been involved in.
What could possibly go wrong? They wanted a BBQ instead of the normal cold buffet. Normally there is 750, this time we struggled to get to 550. No one was interested in helping. And after the overspend on last year, it could not go the same way again.
Despite all that, as they say it was alright on the night. Apart from the eleventh hour phone call to me on Friday night – telling me there was a problem with the published seating plan and it did not match the one on my desk. Serves them right for looking at the one on the desk because it was old purposely to stop the moaning about who they were sitting with. However there were a few issues with those named ‘H’ and is why I was checking it on the Saturday morning at 0700! The printer had not updated the H’s.I confess to panicking Friday night and was about to drop everything to sort it out, however some rational thinking jogged my mind to an earlier conversation with someone who was sat on a different table to his girlfriend….and his surname began with H….
Oh and that was all after my boss decided to reconfigure the marquee on the Tuesday as to the location of tables of 8,10 and 12 and meant I had to reconfigure the seating plan. No one would have known that on the night though! It all made for a trying week.
The standard marquee view – red, white and blue were the colours of choice. Confederate and Stars and Stripes flag. And if you can see to the centre of the table, they were actually hiding the dessert.
We went for the hot food option – it worked and was popular.
Of course we had someone making sure that everyone was behaving. And his arrow was still there at the end of the night!
And there was a timely reminder of history to make sure everyone knew how it all came to be.
Of course if all else failed, we just needed to get our own weapon out
It all worked. There was good feedback. But can someone top it next year……..
The Book Jotter 