The dinner that didn't exist at lunch

Let me tell you about the dinner that didn't exist at lunch.

Every planner has a version of this night. Here is how it usually goes.

Mid-event in Orlando, full group, full schedule. Around midday the educator gets an idea: everyone should go to dinner that night at a restaurant that is genuinely difficult to get into on short notice. All of us. Tonight.

The planner has about two hours.

Two hours

You call in every favor you have. You get the reservation. You find a party bus for the group. You send the details out and hope people packed something nice.

Some didn't, and you hear about it, kindly.

Here is the part I think about: nobody at that dinner knows what it took. They have a wonderful evening. What they gently criticize, the short notice on dress code, sits on top of something nobody announces, which is that the evening itself is a small logistical miracle.

The invisible work

You stay quiet and let them have their experience. That is the job. The planner's work should be invisible. Done right, nobody ever knows how close anything came to not happening.

This is the part of the work that never makes it into a proposal or a portfolio. There is no photo of the time spent on the phone, or the people who said yes as a favor. There is just a group of people having dinner, laughing, completely unaware that this morning the evening did not exist.

The camera stays on everyone else

Someone once told me I am the person who always has the camera focused on someone else and forgets to feed herself. I have stopped fighting that description.

It is also, I think, a decent description of what a great event planner actually is. The work is pointing the camera at everyone else's experience and making sure it is a good one, while your own dinner goes cold somewhere in the background.

I would not trade it. Watching a full group walk into a restaurant that had no tables two hours earlier is one of the best feelings this work gives me.