| rev:text
| - On the 25th of April 2018, several universities collaborated to organize a social event for a conference taking place in Montréal.
After careful considerations and months of planning, we decided to rent the lower level B3 in 1909 Taverne Moderne.
Our contract included access to the location for max 600 people from 7:00 PM until 1:00 AM, over 900 drink tickets valid throughout the night, a variety of food and snacks and access to the wall displays to advertise our work.
Everything started out fine when we, the organizers, arrived at 6:00 PM to setup our material and discuss the events of the evening.
The wall displays were functional and the food was being setup.
However, the first conflict arose around 7:00 PM when we were told that the level above us had rented the big screen to watch the hockey playoffs.
As our event was supposed to be a social event, the loud noise of the hockey match was not something we had anticipated.
We did come to an arrangement where the volume was lowered and during breaks the music was put on again.
I would suggest the venue to inform organizers of such conflicts beforehand.
Somewhere between 10:00 and 10:30 PM, the head of security, which turned out to be the owner, informed us that he found the room was full and that we were not allowed to let more people in.
At that point, our Eventbrite system reported a total of less than 400 attendees, more than 200 less than initially agreed upon.
This resulted in us having to deny registered people access to the venue.
More conflict with the head of security arose when we did decide to allow entry to one of the professors partially paying for the event as he arrived a bit late.
By the time we reached an agreement to allow more people access to the venue, most had gone already and those wanting to come were stopped at the front door by an additional security guard.
Around 10:45 PM, we were informed that the drink tickets would not be valid after 11:00 PM.
We were not able to solve this issue with the head of security while he informed attendees of his decision through the microphone.
Additionally, he started discussing that the event could not last until 1:00 AM as they usually close much earlier.
To add to the confusion, the same person started arguing that attendees were not paying enough tip and that we, the organizers, should mitigate this.
After long discussions, one of our professors had to intervene.
By looking over email conversations and the signed contract, the only consensus we were offered, was to allow drink tickets again for half an hour, of course without informing attendees through the microphone.
Luckily, most of the people in the venue did not notice the discussions and had a great time.
While the waiters and waitresses did a great job and both the food and drinks were very good, we are saddened by the unnecessary conflicts that took place between the organizational team and the head of security.
Nobody wants to get out their laptop to go through each and every email during an event at 11:00 PM after a hard day at a conference.
Usually, one might forsee these kinds of situations by explictly stating every detail in the contract.
However, the agreements clearly described in the contract, were not upheld.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)