"What Could Possibly Go Wrong?"

I wrote a post awhile ago about the "perfect" party not being an indication of fun and thought it might be helpful and/or insightful to share my perspective about some of the most common hiccups and hilarious moments that have/could/and maybe will happen when planning and executing a celebration of any kind. 

  • Someone assumes there's plenty of time to do XYZ.

  • That someone is wrong. 

  • The simplest of meetings/calls will be reschedule a dozen times...and then cancelled.  

  • The budget changes. 

  • The focus/theme/reason for the party changes. 

  • The cost of catering/food is underestimated. 

  • The budget changes again. 

  • If your event uses name tags, you will 100% get into a full blown fight with the printer. 

  • You'll lose the fight with printer. 

  • You'll try to negotiate with the printer to just print the damn name tags.

  • You'll apologize to the printer and beg for forgiveness and suddenly the printer will work. 

  • A million emails about the event will be in your inbox the day before the event. 

  • You'll only have time to respond to 3. 

  • The night before the event you'll wake up in a cold sweat because you had a nightmare about forgetting to do something really really REALLY important. 

  • You'll repeat to yourself the name of the one random thing you're supposed to bring. 

  • You'll forget the one one random thing you're supposed to bring and be mad at yourself. 

  • As you set up, you'll to start to sweat--no matter how cold it is. 

  • Someone will get a paper cut/stub their toe/hurt their knee and you'll have an emergency first aid kit in your packed items--somewhere.  

  • A brief moment of "technical difficulties" will befall the sound system. 

  • You'll suddenly be expected to transform into a sound engineer. 

  • You'll accidentally move something and somehow the sound will turn back on so you'll move away slowly like you meant to do whatever you did. 

  • You'll postpone using the restroom until your bladder is on the verge of exploding because you have just one more thing to fix/do. 

  • You'll suddenly become the most popular person in the world while using the restroom and a dozen people will be searching for you to answer a question. 

  • The event reaches a point where things are running smoothly so you'll sit down. 

  • You'll regret sitting down because you'll realize how much your feet/back/shoulders hurt. 

  • You will get HANGRY, eat the first food item you see and then remember you packed a healthy option. 

  • You'll feel accomplished and elated as all the guest leave happy and smiling. 

  • You'll remember you're on the clean up crew and curse under your breath. 

When planning an event of any kind, know that you'll need to have a lot of patience and be able to adapt quickly because unexpected stuff happens despite your best efforts to control every single element.