This is how it worked. Because these sessions were sponsored by our corporate donors, no fees were charged for the tickets. The donors wouldn’t let us, not wanting any barrier standing between their corporate messages and a room full of people. But because we wanted at least an estimate of how many people were interested in each session, we still required advance registration and the presentation of a ticket at the door. Sometimes the rooms we had available were of varying sizes, and this “no fee” ticketing procedure gave us the ability to make sure we were at least putting the most popular session in the largest room and the least popular one in the smallest.
Except, unlike the lunch sessions, where the vast majority of ticket holders showed up for their sessions -- they had, after all, paid forty dollars for that privilege -- when we didn’t charge anything for the ticket, long experience had shown us that at least a third of the people who had reserved tickets in advance would not, in fact, show up for their sessions. Sure, they checked the box on their registration forms, but that was weeks, if not months earlier, and they had no idea what they’d be doing or how they’d be feeling on the night in question, dazzled only by the tantalizing prospect of free dinners and famous speakers. But when the day finally arrived, many of those ticket holders would find themselves either too tired after a long conference day, or too enticed by the allures of a strange city worth exploring, or too inundated with invitations for competing dinner events -- from other sponsors, from new business partners, from old friends and colleagues -- that the thought of spending another two and a half hours in another hotel ballroom simply lost all of its appeal.
And I can’t say that I blame them. After all, a person can only eat so many rubber chicken dinners and look at so many slides.
So here’s how we had come to handle these sessions. We would set up a rope line outside of each session room; you know, a velvet rope connecting six or seven stanchions together, exactly like what you’ve seen outside of trendy night clubs. When someone came to the door without a ticket, we would ask them to stand behind the rope line until ten minutes passed the listed start time of the session. Then, based on quick count of vacant seats in the session room -- and, as I said, there were always vacant seats in the room, even if the session has been “sold out” -- we would let exactly that many people from the rope line in the room, letting them find a chair and get a late start on their pre-set salad.
It worked -- well. Over the years, we had honed this technique almost to a science. If I had had the gumption, I probably could have written the procedure up for a peer-reviewed journal -- something focused on the psychology of crowds, maybe, or the efficient processing of human actors through public policy initiatives -- and gone on the speaking circuit myself. It’s an elaborate production, especially when multiple sessions are taking place in rooms off the same foyer, and it requires every spare staff person to have the demeanor of a traffic cop and the willingness to treat people like herded cattle, but it works.
Every spare staff person, that is, except Mary Walton. Because on this particular evening, after their conversation with me, both she and Eleanor disappeared, not to be seen in any of the conference spaces until the following morning.
Once all four sessions were up and running, meaning the desserts had been dropped and the first speaker in each room was well into their presentations, four of us -- me, Bethany Bishop, Gerald Krieger, and Angie Ferguson -- gathered at a small separate table in a corner of one of the session rooms for a quick dinner of our own. Four other staff people were still on-duty in each of the four rooms, making sure nothing went awry. They were all junior staffers -- Caroline Abernathy and Jeff Hatchler among them -- and we would relieve them after our quick meal so they could eat and then be excused for the night. As the senior staffers, it was our role to babysit these sessions to their bitter ends. It was a policy that long predated Mary’s more recent promise to never allow another slide to be shown backwards.
In our situation, it was difficult, but not impossible to carry on a quiet conversation while we ate without being overheard or disrupting the session. And Gerald wasted no time.
“So, Alan. Have you done anything about the Wes Howard situation, yet?”
I put my salad fork down. The tone. Already with the tone. Challenging and disrespectful. I was in no mood.
“I tried, Gerald, but Mary beat me to the punch.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that Mary has implemented her own solution to the problem as she understands it.”
“What does that mean?” This time it was Bethany asking the question, and I was suddenly glad she did. It reminded me that there were more things to worry about in this situation than just Gerald’s wounded sense of justice. I didn’t owe him anything. He would only try to goad me into some kind of action that would serve his own purposes, some kind of action I would likely come to regret, but there were others in the organization who deserved to know what was truly going on and what the organization actually thought about them. I looked into Bethany’s eyes and then into Angie’s, and despite the mouthful of Bibb lettuce Angie was busily chewing, I could see the same question clearly written on their faces. Are we safe?
No. You’re not.
“It means,” I said slowly, “that Mary doesn’t see the same problem that we do, so the thing that she’s done to address it doesn’t actually fix the problem we see at all.”
The three of them, including Gerald, seemed to need a minute to let them import of that sink in.
“What has she done?” Gerald asked.
“She talked to Wes and got him to agree not to bring Amy to any more of our functions.”
Another minute of silence. They were waiting for more.
“That’s it?” Bethany asked.
“That’s it,” I confirmed.
“But that doesn’t--”
“I know. That doesn’t do anything to keep Wes from assaulting other members of our staff.”
A third minute of silence. During it, I decided to start eating my salad again.
“What the hell are you going to do about this, Alan?”
It was Gerald, his tone even more threatening than before.
“There’s nothing I can do.”
“That’s not good enough, Alan. You’ve got a responsibility here.”
I felt tired. Maybe more tired than I had been in a long time. I said something I shouldn’t have.
“Oh, go fuck yourself, Gerald. Mary’s holding all of the cards on this one. You go talk to her if you think you can get a better deal.”
I’ll never know the look on Gerald’s face when I said this, because I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. Angry more at myself than this impossible situation, I simply stabbed a forkful of lettuce and crammed it into my mouth.
Nothing more was said on the subject for the rest of the dinner.
+ + +
“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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