Unspoken Katharine Cline President, Preferred Meeting Management M
y very first meeting was a medical meeting — a five-day conference. The first night
was designed as a welcome reception, in which all of the keynote speakers appeared and we checked them off the list. You know, everything’s fine — you don’t have to worry about anyone not showing up. Until the next morning. We’re wait-
ing, and waiting, and waiting, and it’s my first conference, so I’m really not sure how long to wait for our first key- note speaker to come. Everything’s set except for him, but we’d already seen him the night before. So we check the restaurants. He’s not there. We call his room. No one answers. We continue to try to search for him,
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thinking he’s walking around, and I end up going to call him from the house phone again as well as send someone up to knock on the door. Before the person gets up there to knock on the door, I’m calling on the phone, and the person who answers is a woman, screaming incoherently. It turns out that this is a woman who was there with our keynote speaker for the evening: He had died in bed with his secretary. He passed away in his sleep, and she is finding herself in bed with a dead person. The hotel and security took it from
there. The woman was removed from the premises very quickly. We rear- ranged the meeting, so basically, we moved the endnote speaker to the keynote — he volunteered to do that
and was prepared to do that, so it really worked out quite well. It wasn’t a con- ference in which you had to worry about the flow of the meeting and the sessions, because it was all the same topic. And for the endnote, we did a wrap-up panel with all the keynote speakers. I’d been involved with meetings for
several years before that point, but not as a coordinator. So I knew enough about meetings and the unpredictable- ness of them to know that on any given day, a lot of different things can happen, and that your job on site is really to troubleshoot. But I had no idea that that would be one of the troubleshoot- ing things that I’d have to do.