My company is hosting our big event of the year towards the end of the month. We’re expecting about 600 people this year. While we’ve been preparing for the last several months, the stress and worry didn’t hit me until today. We have three weeks until we ship our stuff out to the event center and I’m in charge of the logistics. And there are worries that not everything we need will arrive before ship via freight.

I’m also unveiling some new software for some of our volunteers to use at the event. I have no clue if this is going to work, but from my admittedly limited testing with coworkers, it seems like it will. If it doesn’t work, that’s OK, we can revert to an older system on the fly. But I really want it to work, because I think it’ll be a better experience for the volunteers, attendees, and my coworkers. Plus I don’t want to have wasted all this time researching and setting this up.

On the plus side, last week my event manager and I met with the AV rental company. We were able to knock off $25,000 from the initial quote by getting rid of stuff we didn’t need and by deciding to run some AV stuff ourselves. Didn’t feel so bad about splurging on upgrades to my train/plane tickets after that!

This is my 17th edition of this particular annual event. Yeah, I’ve been with the company that long. Anyway, it always comes together and our attendees are always greatly pleased. If there are issues behind the scenes, our attendees never see or know about them. We have several veteran staff who’ve helped run this event more times than me, So any stress and worry is generally overblown. But we still never want to rest on our laurels.

Regardless, I’ll be happy on July 2, because the event will be over!