Saturday, 21 December 2013

Not a great start...

After the last weeks had been rather busy both with work and social activities, I indulged in an entirely lazy weekend - getting ready for our big event. And while I felt rather calm and relaxed throughout the weekend, Monday morning, on my way to the venue, I had a bit of  a panic moment: Why one earth would anyone entrust me with running a meeting for 900 delegates?! Not sure what got into me... and fortunately the moment passed as soon as we got stuck in.

First though, I got kicked on the tube. This silly woman, who was busy with her phone and stumbled onto me and kicked my ankle really hard with her massive heels. It hurt A LOT and left me with a nice bruise, too. Arriving at the venue, I was then greeted with the fact that the goods lift that our contractors were meant to use was out of order. Fortunately, there were other lifts available, and it didn't cause too much of an issue.

Later that day it turned out that the main exhibition hall gets very dark once the sun has gone down. As I had never seen the rooms in the evening, I of course wasn't aware of that. The venue seriously needs to look into addressing this! They brought out some uplighters which helped a little, but that's surely not a permanent solution! And I have to say, I was rather annoyed that only after I mentioned it to somebody higher up, more lighters were brought out. One person told me that one client had complained about this before, another one told me, this had never been an issue and the third person said, that this has caused a lot of complaints in the past. Maybe you guys want to agree on one version of your story!

All my five volunteers showed up (early) and enthusiastically started working. And they proved to be a great help throughout the event and so sweet! They even asked for a picture with me - made me feel like a celebrity!

The rest of the day seems to be a bit of a blur. No idea what I actually did all day long - but the hours just flew by and at 7pm, we were able to leave the centre with aching feet. Not a good sign given the meeting hadn't even started!

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