Or, a day in the life of an “event technology specialist.”
I never really expected to miss working in a hotel. It’s not quite what I expected to be doing right after college, though I suppose I really had no settled idea anyways. Technically I don’t work for the hotel, I work for the Audio/Visual (“event technology”) company that is contracted to do the in-house AV. But after a while you really become part of the staff.
There’s a certain rhythm to a day in the hotel conference rooms. Most of the morning staff arrives around 06:30, though some get there earlier if there are a lot of rooms waiting to be set, or if the event is starting early. It’s usually quiet, and the daylight is flowing in the big window over the atrium/lobby. Hotel guests are moseying into the restaurant for breakfast, and the waitress is telling them about the buffet. The banquet captains and housemen are putting tables together and setting up for breakfast meetings. Conference services people are making sure the event planners have everything they need and that the rooms match the banquet event orders (BEO’s).
There’s usually a rush just before 08:00, when most meetings start. The group upstairs needs a flip-chart, the executive down the hall needs help connecting to the projector, and the leaders of the breakfast meeting downstairs need to know how to use their wireless microphones.
All this while, you’re keeping an eye out for anything that’s amiss, and making sure the right hotel staff person knows about it. We might not work for the same corporation, but we all have to look out for each other. For the rest of the morning, we make rounds of the rooms to make sure everything is still alright, and get set for late-morning or afternoon events.
Lunch is a bit of an awkward time. There is a cafeteria for the staff, which serves up free hot food. But the two hours it is open is also the two hours where meetings end and begin, where one can check battery levels and talk to the clients about how things are going. I’ve never completely missed lunch though.
At 13:30, representatives from the various departments working on events – sales, the kitchen, conference services, banquets, and, of course, AV – get together to go over the banquet event orders (BEOs) for the next three days. We make sure that all of us are on the same page, because BEOs can come out weeks before the event and often there are changes in the days leading up to it – more people might be coming so banquets will need more chairs and the kitchen will need to make more food, or maybe they decided they need a projector in addition to a screen so AV needs to know to have that set up. We try to keep this meeting short, because we all have to get back to work.
The afternoon is spent tearing down from morning-only events, or setting up for evening events. Sometimes, if the room isn’t in use that night, we’ll set for the next day too. The work in the afternoon is often seems heavier – larger screens, bigger rooms – and much of the staff changes. I’ll usually leave around 15:00 if I got there early in the morning, though some days will stretch to twelve or thirteen hours.
As we get closer to evening banquets, there’s a certain buzz of activity, different than that of the morning. Servers descend upon the tables with china and cutlery, and the clinking of glasses echos through the ballroom. Soon, food is being plated in the kitchen, and servers are pacing in the banquet service hallway. The signal is given, and they start taking food out to the guests. I’ll stand in the corner of the room, watching the event get started, trying to make sure there are no embarrassing mishaps for the event planners and hosts who rely on our equipment.
While dinner is going on, I’ll be setting up other rooms for the next day, or waiting in the office for the event to finish. If there’s a morning event in the same room as the banquet, I’ll have to stay to tear down from the banquet and set up for the morning. Those nights I leave between 23:00 and 01:00. But those are rarely lonely hours because there’s almost always a few housemen setting up stages, tables, and chairs for the morning. We have to work together to make sure everything gets set well – we can’t have a screen off-center from the rest of the setup!
I didn’t expect this to become a day-in-the-life, but, well there it is. I’ll miss this work, the people, the deadlines, the pressure to have things right, the relief of an event well done, and the camaraderie of the people I work with. It’ll be very different from attending lectures, going to graduate seminars, and reading in the library. But I’m glad I’ve worked at the hotel, and I’ll miss it.
