People who organize events sometimes make it look easy and many times their work is under-appreciated. I am definitely guilty of under-appreciating event organizers in the past, but after organizing a ski trip that happened today I now have a ton of respect for event organizers. I will also say that I definitely will not want to do this ever again. Although I am glad I managed to pull this off, my intention in this blog post is not to boast in what I was able to organize (none of the people on the ski trip know of my blog and it is good that they don’t know), but to show all the problems involved in organizing such a trip. I am fortunate enough that the people on this ski trip have expressed their gratitude for my work; other event organizers are not so lucky.
Here’s some background.
Sometimes brothers and sisters from church (especially those who are students) are absolutely terrible at organizing events. For example, last year we planned on going to Kennywood and unfortunately we kept postponing the trip either due to people not being able to make it or because of the weather. Eventually winter came along and Kennywood shut down for the season. It’s not that it was anyone’s fault, it’s just that by nature it is difficult to organize events. People kind of just want to do their own thing and to get a bunch of people together to do the same thing is not easy.
Back in January, we were planning a ski trip for February 13th. We picked that date because some of the brothers and sisters were doing some video training each weekend until the weekend of February 6th and therefore wouldn’t be able to go to a ski trip until the following weekend. Unfortunately because of the snowstorm the weekend of February 6th and the continued inability of the city to clear the snow on the streets, the video training was cancelled two weekends in a row, making the earliest Saturday to go skiing February 27th. As you can imagine, at the rate at which things are going wrong, this ski trip looked like it was going to suffer the same fate as the planned Kennywood trip.
Okay, so how much does it cost to go skiing? $60 for a lift ticket, $32 for a ski rental, $37 for a snowboard rental, a total of $92 or $97 depending on what you decide to rent. Kennywood was only $20 per person. If that failed, how are you going to get people to go skiing?
The answer is you get enough people so that you can get the group rate. $45 for a lift ticket, $20 for a ski rental, $32 for a snowboard rental, a total of $65 or $77 depending on what you decide to rent. It’s still not exactly cheap compared to university department sponsored and subsidized $30 ski trips, but $65 or $77 is a bit more manageable. If you’re going to get burned, you might as well get burned less and that’s how you motivate people to go.
So how many people do we need for the group rate? 20. How many people did we have? 9. So what to do? Someone grabbed two friends and I grabbed two officemates so then we had 13. I then spoke with another officemate about our situation and he said, “Your church friends want to go skiing and you need more people for the group rate? I know a ton of people who want to go skiing.” He then invited himself, another officemate, two of his friends from New Jersey, and all of a sudden we had 17 people. I then spoke with the brother organizing the trip and offered to take control of organizing the trip since I had a bunch of officemates and their friends going and he agreed. Two more people from church decided to go and that made it 19 people. I called the ski resort and the ski resort said that although the official number of people required for the group rate is 20, if you make a reservation and you end up showing up with 17, they will still give you the group rate because they understand that you may lose a few people.
Now an interesting issue is raised. The event organizer now has 19 people and only needs 17 for the group rate. Ideally you would get people to pay in advance in order to “lock them in” but I really did not want to do that. Doing so is definitely the smart move and really should be rule #1 in organizing events, but I did not want to do that to my brothers and sisters. Skiing is inherently dangerous. It’s not like going to the movies. It just didn’t feel right to lock someone into a ski trip. A very contradictory offer must therefore be made. You have to have an extremely generous cancellation policy and at the same time you have to assure everyone that everyone will pay the group rate. I spent two days going crazy over the logistics and then I realized the following: as a grad student my stipend is about $100 per weekday and I just practically flushed $200 of work down the drain. If people cancel on me and it turns out that I only end up with 14 people and I have to eat 3 lift tickets (3*$45=$135), that’s okay with me because I’d gladly pay that kind of money to make all my problems go away. Just as an investment bank needs to underwrite a company’s IPO, an event organizer must assume some sort of financial risk in order to make things happen. If an event organizer is not willing to assume some sort of risk, sometimes it can be extremely difficult to get things done.
Sure, if I really wanted to, I could have told people that they might have to pay extra depending on how many people show up but there are two problems here. First, when you sell a product, you need to specify a certain price and not attach an asterisk saying that the actual price might vary. There must be a certain certainty and finality in the quoted price. Second, come to think of it, even in a probabilistic worst case (say 1 sigma) that I need eat 3 lift tickets and pay an extra $135, $135 really is chump change. I’m not saying that I have a ton of money because I don’t; what I am saying is that I realize that money is just money. Although it is stupid to waste money, it is also just as stupid to hoard it. Money is a tool. If my guarantee that everyone will pay the group rate will ensure that the ski trip does not suffer the same fate as the the Kennywood trip, then I am more than happy to give that guarantee.
It turns out that getting enough people is the least of an event organizer’s worries. Someone’s word that they will go skiing can be iffy, but it still is far more reliable than the weather. Two days before our scheduled February 27th ski trip it started snowing heavily in the mountains: 30 inches of snow before Saturday morning. It’s great for skiing…that is if you can actually get there. On Friday afternoon I had no choice but to tell everyone that the ski trip was postponed to the following weekend. A snowstorm had already delayed our ski trip by two weeks and now this happened.
Then the ugly happened. Three brothers and sisters cancelled. Two of their friends also cancelled. One of two of my officemate’s friends from New Jersey cancelled. We had 13 people left. And the weather forecast for the following Saturday…a high of 46 F? The very last thing you want is for the snow to melt and to refreeze and slush isn’t great either. Skiing on solid ice is not safe and neither is skiing on slush that is really more like bare earth. Fortunately my officemates found another three people so we had a total of 16 people and I only had to eat one lift ticket which I was more than happy to do, and the temperature at the ski resort did not break freezing for a prolonged period of time until Saturday. The snow was actually very nice today and the weather was perfect.
So now as event organizer you have 16 people going and you only have to eat the cost of one lift ticket, and the weather is perfect. Everything is fine and dandy now, right? WRONG! On the day of the event, you have done everything that you can possibly do, but there are things that are still completely out of your control. Your people actually have to show up and you hope they get there safely. When they actually get there and go skiing, you really hope that they don’t do anything stupid and hurt themselves. Although as event organizer you are not legally responsible for whatever retarded ways people may hurt themselves, you really do not want people to get hurt. The last thing you want is for a friend to have a serious injury at a ski trip that you organized. The event organizer has the added burden of caring about these kind of things.
Worrying about others is one thing, but sometimes as event organizer you really have to worry about yourself because you actually have to show up to take care of your responsibilities. Other people may cancel for various reasons, but you absolutely cannot cancel because you are the event organizer. As for me, it was not easy for me to even go on the ski trip. On Tuesday and Wednesday, as the TA of a circuits class, I had to meet with each student for 30 minutes to discuss how they were doing on their design project. During these design reviews, rather than using a table as I should have, I would seat the student in a chair and I would sit in a chair next to the student with my right foot propped up on my left knee, and I would write on a notepad placed on my right foot. When casually discussing something with someone, having my right foot propped up on my left knee is my natural sitting position. There’s nothing like a nice chat with your right foot propped up on your left knee and that’s just my style.
Unfortunately, I sat in that position all day Tuesday and Wednesday, and by Wednesday night I noticed that something wasn’t quite right with my back. By Thursday night the pain was at a point where I could not sit still and do anything meaningful unless I drugged myself with Ibuprofen. On Friday night I went to my small group meeting and after dinner I drugged myself with Ibruprofen again…except that for some reason it didn’t work. At 9:45 pm I left my small group meeting early with the excuse that I wanted to go to bed early because of the ski trip the next morning, but the truth was that I was writhing in utter pain. I will not lie to you…right now I have at best a strained back and at worse a pinched nerve. I sure hope it isn’t a pinched nerve. Knowing that in the worst case I may have a pinched nerve because it sure hurts like crazy if I don’t drug myself, this morning after breakfast I downed 3 Ibuprofen, at lunch I downed another 2, and I felt great all day. At dinner, I downed another 3 pills. How will I know if it is just a strained back or a pinched nerve? I’ll just have to wait and see. If I’m still hurting a week from now, then the ski trip probably didn’t help. Oh well.
Nevermind the back. I’m just glad I made it down the mountain in one piece. There’s no worse feeling on the ski slope than realizing that you need to slow down but no matter how hard you try, you are still accelerating and that your only way out of the situation is to wipe yourself out gracefully. I think I understand how certain Toyota owners feel.
And to top it off, the event organizer has to find the time to blog about the entire ordeal just to decompress but that may only be unique to me.
UPDATE: They all secretly got together and decided that they’d all pay me a few extra bucks. Noooooo! They weren’t supposed to do that!