the aggressive applause, the secret meal access, and other stories from event workers

Recently we heard from people who work at events — their horror stories and wins — and here are 10 of my favorite stories they shared.

1. The applause

I was part of a round of lightning talks. The event organizers told us we had five minutes apiece, and for enforcement they told the audience to applaud violators off the stage.

I was done in 90-odd seconds because I’m cool like that.

“Blowhard Bob” the CISO, however, adored the sound of his own voice and did not believe time limits applied to him. He was barely halfway through his slides when the applause started. He tried to talk over it, being Blowhard Bob, but the audience only raised the volume of clapping until he had no choice but to leave the stage.

I saw his thunderous face as he left the event venue. I never liked Blowhard Bob, so it was a petty treat to see him so uselessly offended.

2. The secret access

I’m a vegetarian in a company that frequently hosts customers or suppliers (on the order of 100+ per week) for all-day meetings, where they are very much trapped and unable to get their own food. A large number of our visitors are also vegetarian/vegan. I have the fortunate ability to bring my own food, but the visitors cannot.

There is almost never a veg option for our catered lunches. The options exist at every location we cater from, but the hosts never select one. I attempted for a year to get the hosts to start adding vegetarian options, but for unknown reasons this ask is impossible.

Finally, I appealed to my network admin friend to give me backdoor access to the catering request website. Each Monday, my Good Deed of the Week is to log in and edit every single new catering form to include a veg option. The hosts often make surprised noises at finding themselves with a tray of veg food (and take the credit when it comes in handy), but no one ever tries to figure out how it keeps happening. Going on 2 years now executing my petty act of good will.

3. The nature soundtrack

Each year, Big Corporation honored retiring 25-year employees with a fancy dinner and dancing 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 and themselves off.

As the guests arrive to the lounge for drinks, oohing and ahhing about the luxurious appointments suddenly stops as the piped-in music becomes audible. Tradition held that the music chosen for the cocktail hour be top 40 hits from the year these folks started at the company, but the intern charged with assembling the playlist decided that because the big new hotel displaced a wetland, recorded sounds of a swamp including croaking frogs and chirping crickets filled the cocktail lounge. People were confused as they held crystal champagne flutes.

4. The medical simulation

One year, we invited a medical simulation team (similar to an emergency simulation, but for medical events) to present at the nursing conference I used to run. They did not tell us the simulation they would be running would involve copious fake blood – which got squirted in lots of different places, including the people sitting in the front row. I think the venue ended up charging us for carpet cleaning too.

5. The grape Kool Aid and the geese

At a corporate headquarters campus preparing for the July 4th outdoor concert and fireworks, that summer had been extremely dry, and special permission and pre-show requirements were needed for the fireworks display to happen to prevent grass fires.

Coincidentally, the campus ponds and fountains were attracting huge flocks of Canada geese because of the drought. Did you know that goose droppings are the size of small dog droppings? Before the hundreds of families came ready to spread their blankets to picnic on the lawns before the concert, vast quantities of goose doodoo had to be removed and said geese needed to be convinced not to return until July 5th . A two-pronged approach was to bring in border collies to scare off the fowl and then sprinkle huge quantities of grape flavored Kool Aid powder, because of course that would send the geese back to Canada (they hate one of the ingredients). Luckily, the problem with this plan was realized before the day of the concert when the landscape crew were doing the required lawn watering in compliance with the fire marshal.

6. The mini figurines

Several years ago, I worked at a nonprofit where we spent all day, every day doing hard (rewarding) work with kids. Once a year, we had a fundraiser that revolved around Legos. We had 1000+ people (kids and adults) come in and pay to do Lego activities with us.

That year, the fundraiser had an add on where you do a minifig (mini figurines) scavenger hunt type thing — join a session, help find minfigs and pick one to take home with you. For budget reasons, they were knockoff minifigs. They were things like Spiderman’s head on a construction worker body on purple and pink legs. Randomly put together pieces that had come in a giant grab bag.

In the second session of scavenger hunt, someone pointed out that some of them were apparently historical figure minifigs? And someone handed me one and I looked carefully … huh, it had a red armband and double lightning bolts.

Crap. Off brand Lego knockoffs provide minifigs for historical dioramas and apparently if you get the “grab bag,” they have Nazis mixed in with the superheros.

We shut things down for a few minutes for us to panic and find all the hidden minifigs. They were replaced with “safe” figs, and we had one poor staff person spend the rest of the day sorting through the offensive and non-offensive minifigs, keeping us one session ahead of the scheduled sessions of scavenger hunt. As far as we know, no Nazis were sent home with children.

Apparently the organization now only uses official minifigs for the Lego event.

7. The cast wrap party

The catering company I used to work 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 psyched to be there. On the night itself, we wondered why the energy in the room seemed so off and oddly subdued.

Then of course, the final season came out a few months later and we understood.

8. The invitation

I worked in higher education development at an institution where the fellows had strongly resisted appointing a professional fundraiser and instead appointed a senior fellow in History as development director – a charming chap but not a fundraiser at all. This manifested in many ways, but perhaps the best one was the event we held to thank a major donor who had contributed a significant sum. We booked a nice location, sorted out some catering, briefed team members ahead of the event, arrived on the day and waited. And waited. And waited some more. DD had one job, which was to invite the donor; he had not done it.

I left soon after this.

9. The chickens

I run a small performing arts venue that hosts over 200 performances/events per year. Here is a recent favorite story that, while low-stakes and neither full disaster nor victory, exemplifies the weirdness of running a public event space.

We had an event that was a collaboration between two very large, community-focused performance groups. Our venue has a strict no pets except licensed service animals and pre-approved on-stage animals policy. One of the performers had a service dog who came to the venue. This was fine. But it wasn’t clearly stated to the myriad other performers that this was a service dog. All of a sudden, the next day, several other cast members brought their dogs and then got deeply offended when we made them take them home. The next day was the public performance and, as audience started arriving, a man walked in with a hard-sided cat carrier. Imagine my surprise when I approached and discovered that it contained two chickens! Turns out his wife was in the show and wanted a picture in costume with her pet chickens. She had told her husband to wait outside for her, but he ignored that fact and was quite rude 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 joking. Yes, chickens. And then my staff kept pulling me aside and going, “Um … there’s a dude with chickens in the lobby?”

It all worked out – they went outside and got their chicken picture and then the husband and the chickens went home and they were never free range in our venue … but its become an ongoing joke whenever things go sideways: Look out for the chickens!

10. The teenager

I used to work fundraising walk events and we’d usually have a grab bag of random volunteers to help us run the event. One year, this older teenage boy who’d been signed up by his mum as part of his community service requirement (I think he was working off a traffic ticket) was assigned to my area.

This kid was only supposed to be there for a short shift of a few hours and since I’m sure it wasn’t his first choice of how to spend his Saturday, I wasn’t expecting too much. He wound up being one of the last people to leave the site, having worked for something like eight or nine hours hauling a lot of stuff around and doing a really good job at whatever we told him to do, all on a really warm day. He said that he had a great time and he really enjoyed himself. I always wondered if that day was the start of his events career.

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