Herding vets

I was at an interesting conference last week, which was grand but not quite grand altogether. The following day the organisers dropped me an e-mail requesting feed-back. But all the links there were to the dreaded Tripadvisor. I'm more comfortable giving back a narrative than a bunch of ★★★★☆s.

Logistics. I've run a few day-long meetings in my time and have some ideas about how to make such things run efficiently. And, like, name-badges! Even with a very small team of Effectives managing time, motion and people can be done with efficiency and dispatch. 

For example, at our village hall last Friday, from a standing start, all-willing D, The Beloved andI slopped out 30 cups of tea and 5 instant coffees in about 4 minutes. As well as stripping the clingfilm off the [Chocolate!] biscuits and getting the milk out of the fridge and into jugs. The Waterford Museum Team made three rookie errors in crowd management.

1. At the morning coffee break a backup of parched conferees trailed across the room, out the door and down the stairs. Because all the catering supplies were crammed on two 2m long trestle-tables arranged in series.
• The key thing is to put the milk and sugar and teaspoons on a different table from the hot-water bowsers. Preferably so that  conferees can get at the goods from all sides. Then put the petit-fours, micro-viennoiserie, sandwiches and biscuits at an even further remove. Folks dither. Nobody wants the *@!!& ditherers causing . That's what happened in Waterford .
2. The programme was as chock full of passion, interest and information as an egg is full of meat.  The very first speaker, an academic who should know better, made a big show of keeping to his allotted 45 minutes . . . and then ran over. It is about correct to say that if he hadn't peppered his talk with references to clocks and alarms, he would have kept to time. But his over-run set the tone and we were 15% over time by the coffee-break. And a full hour adrift by the end of proceedings! It matters because people have trains to catch and parking-meters running as well as their abiding interest in The Emergency.
• there was, because of over-stuffing the programme, no time for questions, comments or elaboration from the floor. That's a shame because the average age in the auditorium was 60+ and some of them would have info or stuff germane relevant to the discussion
3. The programme included 1.00pm Lunch in exactly the same font as 11.30am Coffee Break. But at no time were were told that lunch was forage for yourself. My Dunmore pal David must be from the inner circle (he was after all alive during The Emergency) because he had brought sandwiches. Obvs we're all adults; we can [and did] go across the square to have bowls of hot soup and soda-bread. And as the conference was 'free', adults can understand that the budget might not run to 1.00pm Lunch at any time. But slack time-keeping meant that there were no tables inside and we dined al fresco in November . . . because we're well 'ard. Better comms is easy: 1.00pm Lunch-break: find your own and be back at 2pm sharp.

This is not to cast a crate of asparagus at Team Waterford Museum. They had a limited budget, so they blew it on petit-fours; thinking "slopping out tea for 80+? how hard can that be?" and did that themselves. But catering is Hard Work - physical and logistical.