Maybe it was just the uniqueness of the situation but I felt pretty damned excited that we were having the annual company kick-off party outside of the office. A trade convention had fallen on the same day, and instead of cancelling, the powers that be had simply rented a ball room at the convention hotel. That meant everyone who needed to attend the convention (the entire sales force, in fact) would still be able to get to the party. Of course, the parties were known as terribly boring affairs but this time the company had hired an outside firm to manage everything. That was where I came in. I was the liaison to the party planners.
The venue seemed ideal for a party. It was essentially a large ballroom but there were four or five smaller adjoining rooms, and they’d be perfect for smaller groups to mingle. There would be about three hundred employees at this big soiree, and the anterooms were going to make for a good break from some of the employees (and I was one) who enjoyed smaller crowds a hell of a lot more than larger crowds. On the whole, I was happy with the planners and I reserved one of the rooms, leaving it free of signage so that executives could use it as kind of a retreat since they’d bear the brunt of the hand-shaking networking during the party.
The party, of course, went off without a hitch. They always did. I wasn’t perfect but I was damned good at my job and when it came to handling vendors, there was nobody better. Around 1am I started gently letting the department heads know they should start herding their employees out and by 2am pretty much everyone was gone except for a few stragglers and the four C-Level executives, who held to the old school beliefs that the management should be the last to leave the office, or for that matter, anything. So, they gathered in the little retreat and I poured final drinks for the CEO, the CFO, the CTO, and the COO.
The venue seemed ideal for a party. It was essentially a large ballroom but there were four or five smaller adjoining rooms, and they’d be perfect for smaller groups to mingle. There would be about three hundred employees at this big soiree, and the anterooms were going to make for a good break from some of the employees (and I was one) who enjoyed smaller crowds a hell of a lot more than larger crowds. On the whole, I was happy with the planners and I reserved one of the rooms, leaving it free of signage so that executives could use it as kind of a retreat since they’d bear the brunt of the hand-shaking networking during the party.
The party, of course, went off without a hitch. They always did. I wasn’t perfect but I was damned good at my job and when it came to handling vendors, there was nobody better. Around 1am I started gently letting the department heads know they should start herding their employees out and by 2am pretty much everyone was gone except for a few stragglers and the four C-Level executives, who held to the old school beliefs that the management should be the last to leave the office, or for that matter, anything. So, they gathered in the little retreat and I poured final drinks for the CEO, the CFO, the CTO, and the COO.
