Wadda Mean It's Raining in The Meeting Room?

Don't you just love it when your day starts like this?

• You wake up refreshed after a good night's sleep
• The sun is shining
• The wife already walked the dog
• The kids are still sleeping
• The coffee came out perfectly
• There was no traffic during your drive to work
• You get to work and your desk wasn't hit by a tornado last night and everything is still where you left it

Sounds perfect right? WRONG...

Just then someone bellows over the radio, "It's raining in the meeting room"! "Hurry up, call Engineering"! Well there goes my perfect day.

Now you're racing to find every bucket, bus-tub, unused Lexan and garbage can, to catch the water racing out of the broken pipe from the room upstairs. Son of a b@>\#!

Now we're trying to move the setup for this group into the only other available room we have. Problem is, the group won't fit in that room. We're changing rounds into classroom tables just to squeeze them into the smaller space. It's like shoving 10 lbs of cow turds into a 5 lb bag! (hey Bulletholes, that one's for you!).

We try to dry the special notebook binders that the group contact spent 2 hours last night putting at each placesetting. We change the flipchart pads 'cause the're a mess. Towels come from everywhere to sop-up the water on the carpet. Not a good start to the morning after all.

I huddle with the sales chick (for once I like her 'cause she's the one that has to tell the meeting planner our water lines are a mess, not me). It's either she does that or gets wet and dirty like me. She picks to talk with the meeting planner because she would NEVER want to break a nail!

You can probably guess the rest of the story. We need to bend over backwards and do "service recovery" for this group. "Make sure everything else for the rest of the day is perfect" the F&B Director says. "Why didn't Engineering make sure everything else was perfect and maintain the building so crap like this doesn't happen" I said. Of course he gave me "the look".

Just another perfect day as a banquet manager...

I need a REAL job!

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