Last year during spooky season, we regaled you with the types of horrific tales that only event producers can appreciate as truly scary. So open your Trick or Treat sack, because we have some more goodies for you.
The Case of the Missing Box Trucks
You get off your cross-country flight, Uber to the car rental agency, pull out your reservation receipt and wait for them to hand over the keys to your U-Haul for the weekend. But look around ― the parking lot is empty. Tumbleweeds blow through. The computer has no record of your reservation, and the rental agent breaks the news that there isn’t a truck in the city to be had. There are four pallets of event supplies waiting for you at a loading dock and you have one day to load it all into your site. Time to get creative!
The Sudden Visit from the Devil Winds
You’ve carefully and precisely hung all of your event signage. It’s neat as a pin and even, down to the inch. The site looks beautiful. The weather forecast is clear…or is it? As the sun sets over the desert, sudden violent winds whip through. Your beautiful banners tear their grommets. Those perfectly placed signs whip off their posts, nearly injuring an innocent bystander. The devil winds have struck! 😈
The Unexpected Construction
You’ve had your route planned for months. You’ve traced every inch of it on Google Earth. Your on-the-ground volunteers have walked it twice. You’ve coordinated your road closures with the city. In the wee hours of the morning as you go to place your mileage markers and directional signs, you notice a truck full of city workers in orange vests pulling up to the intersection at your midway point. They fire up the jackhammers and start placing sawhorses smack dab in the middle of your running route. Time for a last-minute re-route!
The Ground That Won’t Be Broken
You have a stack of coroplast arrows to mark your route and boxes of boxes of H-Frames to form the perfect walking path for your participants. You grab a rubber mallet and start pounding and pounding and pounding. But the ground won’t budge. It’s turned to stone!
The Mystery of the Missing Snips
Your event is over, everyone is tired, and you have five hours to take everything down and leave your event site cleaner than you found it. No problem, right? Except you’ve got thousands of zip ties to cut down and no one can find the snips. Maybe you can gnaw through them with your teeth? 🧛
The Shrinking Ceiling Height
Your stage vendor arrives with that 26-foot truss. Only problem is, the ceiling of your event site is 24 feet tall. You could have sworn your site contact told you it was 28 feet! Is there enough time to redo your entire site plan and stage it all outdoors?
The Locked Door
You’ve got eight hours worth of site set-up and seven hours to do it. With your checklist planned meticulously down to the minute, you know you can do it. You show up on site, raring to go. Only one problem ― the gate to your event site is locked. And your site contact’s phone just rings and rings and rings, as the time ticks away…
Event 360 produced 21 events in the month of September alone, which brought us some version of each of these horror stories. But like true event pros, we survived to tell the tale!
Joann Buckley Collins
