The walk back to our conference hotel was a short one, the warm night air mixing pleasantly with a cool sea breeze and making me think of places I’d rather be. When I got to the hotel I marched right through the marble-pillared lobby and up a wide staircase, an immense sea mural of playful dolphins and ethereal jellyfish wrapping around the curving wall to my left, and into the hotel’s dedicated convention space. Two ballrooms, fifteen breakout rooms, a grand concourse for receptions overlooking the ocean, and two dedicated registration desks—everything decorated with the same seashell-shaped wall sconces, pearl-drop and oyster-shell chandeliers, and acres of teal and peach convention carpet, repeating the same interlocking design of starfish and coral to infinity. A group of our staff people were clustered in one of the registration spaces, their fingers combing through thousands of registration envelopes, alphabetized in a long buffet line of much-abused copy paper boxes. Standing off to one side, speaking softly to each other, like prison bosses worried about trouble on the chain gang, were Gerald and Bethany.
“How goes it here?” I asked, nodding a hello to each of them.
“Well, we’re getting there,” Bethany said, smiling like I had brought her an award for maintaining a positive attitude in the face of adversity. “It was a little dicey there for a while, but things are getting put straight now.”
“What?” I asked. “What happened?”
“The freight was late,” Gerald said. “The hotel had everything set for us this morning, but the boxes we shipped from the office weren’t here.”
I looked at the long line of cardboard boxes, dirty and battered from their long trip across the country. “When did they arrive?”
Gerald looked at his watch. “A little over two hours ago.”
“What?!” I cried, looking at my own watch. It was twenty minutes to nine. “What time did everyone get here this morning?”
“A little after eight,” Gerald said. He was smiling, too, but not in the way Bethany was. Bethany looked satisfied, as if pleased for finally getting a chaotic situation under control. But Gerald looked sardonically amused, like a professional auditor, whose job was to find the errors but not fix any of them.
I did the math in my head. “What did everyone do for ten hours?”
Gerald shrugged. “We drank a lot of coffee and took turns going to the can.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” Bethany said quickly, obviously trying to soften the blow. “The computers were working, so we were able to make most of the changes and print all the corrected tickets. We’re just putting them all in the right packets now.”
I looked back at the row of people hunched over the row of boxes. They were all junior staff—Caroline Abernathy and people like her—and they were all combing through the misshapen envelopes into which we had stuffed each attendee’s name badge, ribbons, and session tickets. It was a system designed with the convenience of the attendee in mind. Stroll up to the registration desk, give us your name, and we’ll hand you a catalog-sized envelope with everything you need for the conference inside. It kept lines at the on-site registration desk to a minimum, but it required weeks worth of effort back in the office, weeks when hundreds if not thousands of changes to the registration records were coming in. Given the lead time necessary to create the envelopes—or “reg packets,” as we called them—there was never a time when we could just print the materials, stuff the envelopes, and be done with them. No, for the last few weeks before the conference we were running daily batches of corrected tickets and badges, and constantly going into the packets, loosely alphabetized in discarded copy paper boxes on long tables set up in our multi-purpose room, to remove old materials and insert new ones. The junior staff assigned to such thankless work usually developed a condition we called “packet finger,” nails and cuticles torn and sometimes bloodied by brushing repetitively by all the envelope flaps. Indeed, nearly every staff person now working feverishly to stuff the last remaining items before tomorrow’s grand opening had band-aids on at least one of their fingertips.
“Has anybody eaten anything?” I asked, trying not to calculate all the wasted staff hours.
“We had the hotel bring down some lunch around one o’clock,” Gerald said. “But no one’s had dinner yet.”
“Should we go get some?” I asked quietly, remembering Mary’s lie to Eleanor about me taking the staff out for a celebratory dinner. I knew such a thing would never fly, that unless I took everybody to Burger King I could never get away with expensing such an extravagance. But it felt like I should do something.
“I think everybody here would just prefer to finish the job,” Bethany said. “I heard Caroline and a few of the others talking about going out afterwards, but I think most will want to get a quiet bite and then go to sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a big day.”
Going out meant going to the bars and clubs—probably a foolish thing to do on the night before the start of the convention, but I kept my mouth shut. I looked over at Caroline and her eyes flipped up momentarily, her fingers still walking through the ‘H’s below. Our eyes met briefly and she gave me a look I could only describe as equal parts apprehension and mistrust. I tried to silently reassure her, but she turned back down to her bandaged fingers.
“This is seriously fucked up, Alan.”
It was Gerald. He wasn’t angry, but his tone sought to make a point.
“I know,” I said, not taking my eyes off Caroline and remembering the way Don had humiliated her and made her cry.
“There are better ways to do this,” he went on, speaking softly but insistently. “There are vendors that handle this kind of thing—registration for large conferences. Making our people do this is a waste of their talent and the client’s money.”
“I know,” I said again. He was right. This was stupid. Anyone standing here could see that. I had just arrived, but Gerald had been watching the madness for ten hours.
“Are you going to do something about it?”
It was a good question. I knew something certainly should be done about it, but I didn’t know what. I had talked to Mary about it before, and it seemed like this was the way she wanted things. A vendor couldn’t be trusted to get everything right. For some members this was the one interaction they had with staff all year. It was an essential part of the client service pledge we have made to the organization. Sitting in her palatial office surrounded by her stolen treasures these bogus reasons were persuasive, delivered, as they were, by all the force of her authority and with the veneer of character. They were obvious, incontrovertible, the very foundation of the business model that drove our success. But standing there looking at the human misery they caused, those reasons were empty, baseless, and cruel.
I didn’t immediately understand it—this incongruity of thought that manifested with changes in time and place—and wondered naively how I could explain it to Gerald when I couldn’t even explain it to myself. Too bad I hadn’t yet learned the simple rule that a boss was under no obligation to answer every question asked of him.
“I don’t know if I can.”
It was the truth, but sometimes the truth should keep its damn mouth shut. Gerald looked at me dismissively, his eyebrows lifting and his nose turning down so he could peer at me over the top of his designer eyewear.
“I see,” he said with a tone of profound disappointment, as if I had just failed some colossal test.
“What would you have me do, Gerald? You know where Mary stands on this.”
“Maybe you should bring her down here? Let her see for herself how ridiculous this all is.”
“She’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow will be too late,” he said bitterly. “By tomorrow everything she sees will convince her she is right.”
“Then what should I do?”
Gerald stood silently for a moment, an idea clearly creasing the corners of his eyes, but his lips wrestling with some unwillingness to share it.
“Tell them to stop,” he said eventually.
“What?”
“Tell them to stop. Let’s call it a night. Whatever still needs doing they can finish in the morning.”
I traded a look with Bethany, wanting confirmation that I had heard Gerald correctly and her assessment of how feasible such a suggestion was. Her doubtful look told me everything I needed to know.
“How much is there left to do?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” Gerald snapped.
“Of course it matters. If they’re almost done, they might as well finish.”
“They’re not almost done,” Gerald said quickly, as if he was making it up on the spot. “There are hours of work left to do. They could work all night and they wouldn’t finish it.”
I looked at Bethany again for the same kind of confirmation, and she gave me the same doubtful look.
“Does that change anything, Alan?” Gerald said. “Come on, call it a night. They’ve worked long enough.”
At the time I didn’t know what Gerald was trying to do. The nearest I could figure, he was worried about staff morale, that he thought working people all night long on such a menial task degraded them, and that maybe they would work better and harder in the morning if we showed them a little bit of our humanity tonight. But if so, then Gerald was clearly overplaying his hand, pretending there was an impossible amount of work left for them to do. Even I could see that there wasn’t, and at my side was Bethany, wordlessly and dutifully reinforcing my perspective. Muscling on through and getting it done seemed like the wiser course of action.
It was another rookie mistake. By that time I should have known not to take people like Gerald at their word.
“They’re almost finished,” I said. “Let’s pitch in and help them get it done.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Gerald said, throwing up his hands. “You do whatever you want. I’m out of here.”
He stormed away, making a huff loud enough for all the junior staff to hear. I looked over and saw a few brave heads peek up, but most of them kept their noses down in their work.
“What’s up his ass?” I asked Bethany under my breath.
She shook her head. “He’s been grumpy all day.”
“Well, whatever,” I said, dismissing Gerald from my mind. It had been a long day, and I figured I could give him till the morning to apologize. “Let’s go help them finish.”
“Okay, boss.”
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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