Twenty sessions of twenty people each meant that only 400 people could be accommodated, leaving 1,600 or more to fend for themselves, seeking lunch in one of the hotel outlets, nearby restaurants or food trucks, or hospitality functions organized by the exhibitors. With so many people heading off in so many different directions, the foyer outside the ballroom frequently resembled a busy subway platform, and through the years we had come to understand the value of placing staff members at strategic flow points to serve as guideposts and gatekeepers.
“Where’s the session with Dr. Maplethorpe!” one conference-goer shouted at me as she quickly approached, seemingly pulled along more by the current of bodies than her own volition.
“Up one level and down the hall to the left!” I shouted back, pointing towards a flight of escalators where a bottleneck was already forming.
Like a lot of the staff, I enjoyed complaining about the herd mentality that possessed otherwise intelligent people in these circumstances. To control access to the twenty lunch sessions they were ticketed, with each ticket costing the ticket holder forty dollars in addition to the conference registration fee they had already paid. This caused a lot of grousing, the average conference attendee oblivious to the fact that the lunches that came out of hotel banquet kitchens could easily cost forty dollars or more. On each ticket, which we painstakingly stuffed in the registration envelopes each attendee received at the start of the conference, we printed all the information they could possibly need about the session they were attending. The day, the time, the room location, the session number, the session title, the discussion leader -- they were all there in their laser-printed glory. And, if anyone cared to turn the little piece of cardboard over, they would see a miniature reproduction of the appropriate floor of the convention hotel, where some underappreciated human being had actually affixed a small red star in the box that represented the session’s room location.
But no one, it seemed, looked at these tickets, or tried to decipher the curious markings they contained. Why bother? When it was so much simpler just to shout “Where’s the session with Dr. Maplethorpe!” at the nearest idiot wearing a staff badge?
I and four other staff people served in this capacity for fifteen minutes or more, and, when the flow of people out of the ballroom slowed to a trickle, we all rushed off to our next assignments. The lunch sessions would be starting in another ten minutes or so, and we had to make sure the rooms, discussion leaders, and participants had everything they needed. With five staff people and twenty sessions, we had each been assigned four rooms to monitor. My four were down the same hallway as those assigned to Caroline Abernathy, and when I turned into the corridor I saw her engaged in a heated argument with an attendee.
“Get out of my way!” the attendee, who I could only see from behind -- a man in a wrinkled sport coat with frizzy white hair -- was shouting at Caroline, who stood, along with the redcoat we had hired to collect the session tickets, in the doorway of the room.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Caroline said, her voice a strange kind of shaky calm, “this session is for ticket holders only. Do you have a ticket?”
“NO I DON’T HAVE A TICKET!” the man shouted.
Both Caroline and the elderly redcoat who could have been her grandmother seemed to tremble under buffeting winds of his angry voice.
Knowing there was nothing I could do that Caroline wasn’t already doing, but wanting to take some of the pressure off her young shoulders, I stepped into the fray.
“Can I help you, sir?”
The man whirled like he was in a street fight. “What? Who the hell are you?”
His appearance gave me a momentary pause. I recognized him, and it took me half a second to remember from where. He wasn’t wearing the Pink Panther tie he had been wearing the last time I saw him, but it was the same guy. The goofball that had tried to derail Eleanor’s chosen speaker at the leadership meeting I had attended earlier in the year. I looked at his name badge, hanging from a string of Mardi Gras beads around his neck. Roger Rockhammer.
I told him my name and my title, and then took him by the elbow to try and steer him out of the flow of traffic that was still trying to get down the hallway to the other lunch sessions.
He shrugged me off. “Get your hand off of me!” he shouted. “Now, you listen to me. I came all the way from New Mexico to attend this session, and you’re not keeping me out of it.”
“But, Mr. Rockhammer,” I said as politely as I could. “This session requires a ticket and you didn’t purchase one.”
“I’ll buy one now,” he said, reaching for and producing a wallet that, I kid you not, had a cloth decal of the Tasmanian Devil stitched on it.
“The session is already sold out,” I told him, not bothering to check that fact with either Caroline or her grandmother. All the lunch sessions were always sold out.
“But there are empty seats in there!” he pleaded, his arm shooting out to indicate the interior of the session room and almost hitting Caroline in the forehead.
I instinctively looked into the room and saw the expected conference table set for twenty, the ensemble practically filling the small meeting room, with perhaps fifteen or sixteen people sitting shoulder to shoulder in fifteen or sixteen of the chairs, some already munching on a salad that a beleaguered banquet captain struggled to place in front of each. None of that surprised me. Not the tight set and not the handful of empty chairs. What did surprise me was the person who was sitting at the very head of the table, in the position typically reserved for the session’s discussion leader.
It was Eleanor Rumford. She was sitting there, silent and unmoving, a fork in one hand, but her salad as yet undisturbed. For a heart-stopping moment, her eyes locked with mine, and I knew what I had to do.
“Mr. Rockhammer,” I said, turning back to him. “I’m very sorry, but this session is sold out and those seats are reserved for ticket holders.”
He quickly inhaled and opened his mouth, but I raised my voice and rushed into my next sentence.
“No, I’m sorry. I’m going to have to ask you to leave this session before you create a disturbance.”
His face turned red with the insult, but before he could sputter another protest, another attendee approached from my right. As if I had pre-arranged it, he held up a ticket and I took it from him while Caroline stepped slightly away from the doorway to allow him into the room.
“There, you see,” I said. “Ticket holders are still arriving. Every chair will be full in the next few minutes. Now, really,” I said, taking him more firmly by the elbow, “why don’t we go down to the registration desk and see if we can accommodate you in one of tomorrow’s sessions.”
“I came here to attend this session!” Rockhammer cried, but offered no other resistance to my coaxing. In a moment I had him moving back down the hall, and a moment after that we were on the escalator together, practically alone in going down while a swarm of people were still jostling each other to go up in single file. When his legs stopped moving his lips started moving again. He protested the treatment he was receiving, loudly, I thought, more for the benefit of the friends and colleagues he might be passing on the escalator than out of any true sense of injustice.
I let him have his say, standing as stoically as I could on the escalator step just above him. We were moving in the right direction, after all, and I suspected that I might have already scored the necessary point. Down the upstairs hallway, in a small and cramped meeting room without any windows, I could imagine Eleanor Rumford starting her session, pleased that someone had delivered her from contact with her boorish nemesis.
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“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.
Image Source
http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/
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