Categories: uncategorized
Date: 13 April 2005 11:33:57
I started to look after a conference for people who work with people who have special needs. They use various parts of the arts and social work to achieve this. It has brought out a lot of the usual suspects. But it happens with conferences. A week before I could give you a pretty good run down of what the majority of guests will look like and how they would prefer directions. For instance when giving a engineer directions they want clear scientific directions go 150 metres turn right etc. But for the more social work deal it is walk along and you'll see a brown building with a vine with purple flowers and turn right. I had to learn in my former job that different types of people need the same information in different ways. But I digress.
I started at 6 so the porter could bring all their freight up to the rooms where they were. The clients arrived at 7 and all was going well when I was aksed to go with one of the presenters to her room. The young lady was in a wheel chair. I could not keep up. I am sure she was trying to make the fat guy in the suit sweat big time. I tell you those electric wheel chairs can get pretty quick speeds and going up inclines like ramps does nothing to slow it down. The problem was she was presenting in the smallest room we have. It is the size of the average lounge room. To make it easier we had 15 seats, two tables for the presenters, a computer on a small table and a screen. She could not even wheel into the room because of the chairs placement. I called the AV guy and the chair guy and totally changed the room so it would work. Sometimes you just wish to turn to the client and say "You've seen this room and the plans how did you think it was all going to fit?". But it was their first day so we go a bit soft and as always it worked out.
Just after nine I was walking through the hallway and the client was quite frantic. They had lost a presenter!! He had arrived and checked in but was now missing. To make matters worse he has a medical condition and they were afraid he was passed out somewhere. I checked the toilets and called security with his description. After 10 minutes of 4-5 people franticaly looking for him he was found. He was found in the room he was presenting in and was .... presenting!!! I just wanted to give the client a hug and say next time before we start freaking out looking for someone lets make sure they really are missing!!
It was very quiet apart from that so I wished something like that happened in the afternoon to liven things up a bit. The highlight of my arvo was a mini caramel macadamia tart mmmm. It had been a few months since my last one and it was very good. By the time I called a code ate and my colleagues arrived another department came in massive numbers and wiped out the tarts. In my time of doing this blog I never really thought I would write wipe out the tarts. But there you have it.
Till Next Time Try Not to Wipe Out the Tarts,
Chops