I've been holding it in for the past week, but as I woke up this morning and saw my Facebook bombarded with pics of friends with celebrities partying it up in Indianapolis for the Super Bowl, I have to let it out....I AM JEALOUS!!!!
I remember in 2007 when my old manager called me after having presented the Super Bowl bid in Atlanta and said, "I think we nailed it." I was elated 1) because I worked for the city of Indianapolis and 2) because I wanted to a part of the planning committee!!
I am sure that if my world hadn't collided with a husband and two kids that I still wouldn't be partying it up at the Super Bowl...instead I'd be behind the scenes working 20 hour days sober as a goat. Like when I lived in Indy and all of my friends would camp out at the Indianapolis 500 partying for 2 days straight and I was working the entire weekend camping out on our office floor too tired to even drive home.
In case you didn't know this, in my previous life I was what they call an "Event Planner", but sometimes I think the word "slave" seems more appropriate. It didn't surprise me when I heard that an Event Coordinator landed at No. 6 as the most stressful job according to CareerCast. In front of it was: Enlisted Soldier (No. 1), Firefighter (No. 2), Airline Pilot (No. 3), Military General (No. 4), Police Officer (No. 5). You can read the article here.
Here are two examples of why this listing seems fitting:
1) I held an event in Lake Tahoe back in 2002 and worked for 26 days straight, 18 hours a day. That's 468 hours in less than a month. To cap it off, every single morning at 5:30am our "bus" (lined with leather couches that we borrowed from Aerosmith's band WITH the same bus driver who drove for them...okay, so that's not very slave-like) departed from the mountains of Lake Tahoe down to the desert. And every single morning due to exhaustion, altitude, and the smell of the breakfast on board, I had to sit up front with the bus driver with a bag in my hand while I concealed my vomiting from my clients. Every single morning.
2) My 2nd most memorable event came in 2003 during an event held in Indianapolis. This was a city-wide event of 60,000+ people therefore every single hotel in Indianapolis was being used. On the very very top of all of those people stood one man, I will call him Mr. Rubenstein, my #1 VIP coming in from New York. Around 3:30am one morning I received a phone call from a frantic Hyatt employee telling me that he had just "walked" Mr. and Mrs. Rubenstein. In hotel terms, to "walk" means that you held a reservation at the hotel but it was sold out and therefore you are "walked" to another nearby hotel. I sat straight up in my bed, having gone to sleep like an hour before, and asked where he "walked" them. He hesitated and said, "I put them in a cab and sent them to the Days Inn. It was the only hotel that had a room available." I am pretty sure I openly screamed "F&CK!!!!!" To note, the Hyatt employee failed to notice that he was coded in the system as "VIP", meaning "do not walk."
This forced me to have to make the most feared phone call of my life at the time...to the President of the event's organization, I will call him "Scott." Scott stood at 6'4", built like a lineman and had the voice of a gorilla. He scared the sh*t out of me. So here I am at 3:30am calling him. I was all of 23 years old. He didn't answer. I left a message telling him the news. He called me back 15 minutes later. I answered, he screamed, "YOU FIND MR. RUBENSTEIN THE BEST DAMN HOTEL ROOM IN INDIANAPOLIS AND YOU DO IT WITHIN THE HOUR!!!!! YOU SEND HIM A LIMO AND IF A LIMO ISN'T AVAILABLE YOU GO AND PICK HIM UP YOURSELF."
That was lovely. So I made phone calls while getting dressed and headed down to the Hyatt. I fetched Mr. Rubenstein a limo. When I made it down to the Hyatt I walked in and saw that every Hyatt exec was also there, including the GM. Mr. Rubenstein and his wife (who ran a close 2nd to Scott as the scariest person alive) arrived. The GM of the hotel handed him a key and said, "as far as I'm concerned, you own the hotel." They escorted him to a room.
When I asked the GM how he got him a room he said, "I kicked out the wedding party in the honeymoon suite." Oh dear God.
Why I am telling you all this, I have no idea. So consumed in my current life, I haven't thought about my "before" life in years. But the Super Bowl being held in Indy is making the memories flood in. Although I think having planned this big event would have been an amazing once-in-a-lifetime experience, I am just as content having just wiped the two poopiest diapers ever. It is no wonder I left the 'glamorous' event planning world and chose to be a 'glamorous' stay-at-home mom.
However, how is it that being a stay-at-home mom is 10 times harder than my role as an event planner ever was? And I wonder, where is "Mom" on this list of most stressful jobs? I would gladly volunteer Event Coordinator to be replaced with Mom.
