There’s one thing all conference planners universally dread—the early morning or late-night phone call from a vendor. You know, the kind of call that makes your stomach drop faster than a freight elevator (foreshadowing, anyone?). Because by the time we get onsite, every spreadsheet, diagram, and sticky note has been obsessively reviewed, color-coded, and triple-checked. So when that phone rings at 6 a.m.? It’s never good news. Ever.

Let’s rewind to 2009. It’s the first morning of a three-day conference (okay, fine, two and a half days, but let’s not split hairs). We’ve got more than 600 sessions across 35 meeting rooms—aka, a logistical Rubik’s Cube of coffee breaks, AV setups, and room flips. I’m walking from my hotel to the convention center at an hour so early it should be illegal when my phone rings. The caller ID says it’s my AV contact, “Dalton.” Cue the dread.

“Hey, Anna,” Dalton starts, in the tone that instantly says brace yourself. “Do we have sessions in the 100-level rooms?”

“Yes,” I reply confidently. “At 8 a.m.—as outlined in the very detailed schedule I sent you.”

He pauses. “Yeah… those rooms are empty.”

“Empty?” I ask, thinking maybe he means “no people yet” empty.

“No,” he says, “empty as in no tables, no chairs—nothing.”

Now, to be clear, those rooms had chairs the day before. They’d hosted pre-conference workshops in nice, neat rounds of ten. Overnight, the convention center was supposed to “flip” them into theater-style seating. Apparently, someone took “flip” a bit too literally and just removed everything.

I tell Dalton to keep setting up AV while I call the convention center. Enter “George,” the venue’s conference manager. I give him the Cliff Notes version of our problem. George, who’s still at home, promises to make some calls. Ten long minutes later, he rings back to say, “Well, it seems the overnight crew took all the chairs and tables to storage… and now the freight elevator is broken.”

Broken. As in, no way to get 600 chairs down four floors.

He assures me maintenance is on the way and everything will be fine by 8 a.m.

Spoiler: it was not fine by 8 a.m.

By 7:15, speakers are wandering into the 100-level rooms to set up—and finding nothing but carpet. I’m sprinting from room to room apologizing, assuring them we’re working on it, and praying for a miracle. Meanwhile, my coworker in our staff office starts radioing like she’s reporting breaking news:

“101 has no chairs!”
“102 has no chairs!”
“103 has no chairs!”
“104 has no—wait. NONE of the 100-level rooms have chairs!”

Yep. We had officially achieved “chairmageddon.”

So what did we do? We improvised. The first sessions of the day were held sans chairs. Attendees sat cross-legged on the floor like they were back in kindergarten, and I joked that it was their chance to “channel their inner child.” To my eternal relief, most of them laughed.

Was it my finest moment as a conference planner? Absolutely not. But unless I wanted to personally haul 600 chairs down a broken freight elevator, there wasn’t much else I could do.

The rest of the day (and conference) went off without a hitch. My boss—thankfully presenting in a fully furnished room—was satisfied with the hefty discount we received from the venue.

And me? I learned a valuable lesson that day: you can plan for everything, but you can’t plan for a broken freight elevator.

Until the next disaster,
The Anonymous Planner