ATTN Mr. Speaker: Please stop speaking.

The BBQ Pit
1

I have a simple and polite request for those of you who are invited to give pre-dinner/lunch/breakfast talks at conventions:

When you see the serving staff start carrying in pans of food and loading them into the chafing dishes on the buffet line, this is your cue to start wrapping up your speech.

I’m going to hazard a guess that, while you’re still yammering away twenty minutes past the scheduled meal service, your audience is wishing you would shut the fuck up so that they can eat. Because they’re probably fucking hungry.

The serving staff is also wishing you would shut the fuck up, because they’ve brought out the food, and they’ve now been standing around with their figurative thumbs up their figurative asses for the last twenty minutes with absolutely nothing to do besides roll their eyes at each other and mouth the words, “Does this guy own a fucking watch?”

The cooks are wishing you would shut the fuck up so that they can clear out the food for this meal and get started preparing the next one. We don’t have unlimited space in the kitchen.

The dishwasher is wishing you would shut the fuck up, because we also don’t have an unlimited supply of clean dishes and odds are good that he needs to get this meal’s dishes cleaned so they’ll be ready for the next meal.

The local health department is wishing you would shut the fuck up too. You see, those chafing dishes on the buffet line are not intended to keep the food hot indefinitely — they’re intended to help maintain the temperature for the expected short amount of time between the pan of food being placed into it and the guests scooping all the food out of it. The health department has rules about how long food can be left in a chafing dish before it has to be either returned to a proper hot-holding unit or discarded.

Everybody wishes you’d shut the fuck up, because the odds are good that the group you’re addressing is not the only group holding an event in the convention facility. And these other groups, who are elsewhere in the building, are also having meals. So there is some rather complex scheduling and timing going on in the background in order to make sure everything goes off when it’s supposed to, and when you keep talking well past the time you were supposed to stop, it throws everything off. Not the least of which is this: it may only be twenty minutes to you, but that twenty minutes becomes an hour of lost time for every three staff members working the event. Make that an hour and a half per three employees if your over-long speech means the cleanup afterward takes twenty minutes longer and puts the whole crew into overtime.

To wrap things up … shut the fuck up.

2

And that reminds me of another interesting story . . .

3

Any reason you can’t start serving people while he’s speaking, just as a hint?

4

…dude, its a banquet. Things like this happen. Trust me, I’m a Banquet Bear. :wink:

This might shock you, but people attend conferenences to listen to the speaker! While I’m sure that some people attend for the food, thats not the main focus of the attendees, and its not the main reason they fork out big money to attend.

Banqueting is fun: and sometimes nothing is more fun than when things go wrong.

We once had a two hour window to turn a venue from classroom to a sit-down buffet dinner for 220 pax. Simple stuff, right?

About twenty minutes into the turn, the client turned up and starting to tell the Banquets Manager that it was all set up wrong: it wasn’t supposed to be a buffet, it was supposed to be something else entirely. After ten minutes of negotiation, it was decided that the room needed to be set up as a standing dinner, with drop tables, and standing buffets.

So we cleared away the dinner tables and started setting up lots of smaller buffet stations around the room.

Then an hour later the real client turned up.

Turned out the guy the Banquet Manager was talking to wasn’t the client at all, just a low level flunkie. And the real client was wondering where all the dinner tables were, and what the hell was going on.

We had fifteen minutes to set up the ballroom for dinner, and the dinner tables had already been packed away! We managed to do it by calling on all hands: kitchen porters, cleaners, concierges, organisers, PCO’s, you name it they were throwing cutlery on the tables. And bang on time, the doors opened and in walked the guests none the wiser.

My point? In banqueting things are predictably unpredictable. Speeches run long, speeches run short. Clients are lovely and clients are horrible. On one particularly horrible night one of the Kitchen Hands unfortunately passed away in the kitchen pot wash area. Did the client care about this? I’m sure he did, but he also had one-thousand paying guests about to walk out into the mezzanine and they were all hungry people. So the team moved out of the kitchen and into one of the function rooms, while Security worked desperately to bring the Kitchen Hand back to life.

If your team go into every day with the predictably unpredictable mindset, creating order out of chaos becomes easier. Me and my team would always be liasing with our client: getting updates on how long speeches would be and if there going to be any problems. Even before we got to the night, the Event Coordinator would be finding out what time speeches were and encouraging speakers to speak after the main course. Speeches are always going to run long or run short, being prepared for that is what makes the difference between a Banquet Bear and a Banquet wanabee.

And even being as pro-active as you can be, sometimes the speaker just does go over time. And when he does, and you have multiple events in multiple conference rooms with complex scheduling and timing, well, thats what running shoes were invented for!

I know that its easy to blame the speaker, but quite honestly they are often the last person who can be blamed in a giant cog of people who can be blamed! Although I do understand the nature of your rant though…

Papa Bear, of the Sacred Order of the Banquet Bears

5

I attended a workshop this past week at which we were served lunch. Day one, they brought in Chicken pieces from Chik-Fil-A.

This was a mistake. They smelled like fried chicken and quickly filled the room with the delicious and distracting aroma. The last fifteen minutes before lunch was an eternity.

Day 2 and 3 they were much wiser–lunch was cold, and did not offer an enticing aroma, but still tasted good.

6

Well, you don’t exactly “serve” a buffet :stuck_out_tongue:

However, were it a served meal, no, doing that wouldn’t be allowed.

C’mon, dude (dudette?), when somebody’s ranting they’re not interested in rational explanations :smiley: When I’m 11.5 hours into my 5th consecutive 12-hour day in the kitchen, all I want is to get the hell out of there, which I can’t do until the buffet is pulled and I’ve put away anything savable (or, in the case of a serve, wait to find out if I need to fix anything for the Kosher-keeping gluten-free lactose-intolerant vegan with nut allergies who waited until the meal was being served to inform anybody of her dietary needs).

I have a union contract! I’m entitled to rant!

(What exactly is a “banquet bear”?)

7

Reminds me of one of my favorite movie quotes

8

With all due respect, WTF is a banquet bear?

9

Since when do people give speeches - other than the host giving a very short one - before a banquet?

I’ve been to a fair few banquets, and speeches are invariably afterwards. The diners are by that point reasonably well oiled and much more receptive.

Maybe it’s a U.K. vs U.S. thing?

10

In this particular case, the convention attendees were there for three or four days. They had various classes and sessions, and would break for meals. The meals were in a completely separate room from where they were having their sessions/classes, and the pre-meal speakers appeared to be there just to give a short, inspirational talk or share an anecdote before the meal (as opposed to the speakers being part of the “official” convention content). But most of them just kept talking, and kept talking. For example, one was a ~90-year-old man who I guess was supposed to tell how he got involved with the organization, or how the organization helped him, or something like that, and instead it turned into him telling his whole life story.

That was the main issue that prompted my OP. After 3+ years in the convention catering business, I’ve seen a couple hundred of these events come through, and most of them do a good job of keeping things on schedule. This particular group, though, kept wanting to change all the meal times, pushing them back 15-30 minutes or asking for things early (sorry, the food’s not ready yet), at the last minute, as well as letting these pre-meal pep talks run overtime.

When a group is just doing a one-shot event, like a banquet, they do indeed usually wait until people have their food before starting with the speechmaking.

11

It’s like a masturbating bear, but you can confidently eat the soup served.

12

I would have assumed it was the opposite of a banquet bull?

13

I really want to know what a banquet bear is as well. Is it a bear to butchered for your banquet?

14

I’ve been in such situations, as both a server and as a diner. In both cases, I’ve wished for a microphone with a timer. Speaker is notified that he has been alloted 30 minutes to speak. The mike will flash a subtle light at the 25 minute mark, then again at the 28 minute mark. When the timer hits 30:00, the mike goes dead.

Sometimes I want to hear the speaker. More usually, I’m at a banquet because it’s a social event, sometimes with a business aspect as well, and the speaker is just someone who the hospitality committee could find who would speak cheaply or for free.

I’ve quit going to my credit union’s annual meeting, because they have an extremely loud country band, the Miss Texas Pageant winner, and clowns making balloon animals. The band is so loud that the last time I went, my head was ringing for three days afterwards. And I hate country anyway. By the time the speaker makes his speech, my head hurts so much that I can’t follow it.

Most speakers vastly overestimate their entertainment value.

15

A real hit in San Francisco.

16

Last time this happened to me, I was sitting at a front corner table, near the buffet. So as a server went by, I asked him if the food was ready. When he said yes, I and the others at my table got up and went to the buffet line and started filling our plates. The next table behind us was apparently hungry too, because as soon as we got into the line, they got up and came to the line, too. And the other tables followed in turn.

I think the speaker blathered on for a while before he ended his speech. We didn’t really notice, we were eating our meal. If he can be rude by running over the scheduled time, we can get our meals when they are ready.

17

:smiley:

…sorry to leave you hanging guys.

The Sacred Order of the Banquet Bears are a unofficial group of NZ Banquet Professionals who first met at the Skycity Conference Centre, have kept in touch with each other over the years, and spread our “ethos” to every venue we have worked at since. A Banquet Bear is:

  • Loyal to other Bears
  • Respectful and professional in all its dealing with customers, employees and employers
  • Leaves work at work and takes nothing home

There are Banquet Bears at venues now all over the country. We have our own dance, our own growl, our own Bear names (I am Papa Bear) and our own very high standards.

Pathetic, I know! But a Mister Rik has shown the hours in banqueting/events can get insane, and the workload at time even insaner. For about three months at one venue I started work as the sun was setting, and went home as the sun was coming up. My record shift was 25 hours without a break! So to keep people distracted and focused on the job and to keep them from going out and becoming alcoholics (like most everyone else in the industry!) we created something quite different and to those of us involved, quite special.

18

As one of the guys who provides the technical services for the convention industry, I’m with you on most of this rant. Especially the breakfast speakers. For a breakfast event that starts at 8am, I have to be there at 6am to be able to make sure that all systems are still ready to go. We have to make sure that the video people have their slides, clips, graphics, power point, etc. ready. We do tech rehearsals and tech run-thrus without the clients. We do maintenance that there wasn’t time to do the night before, when the speaker wrapped at 11pm.

We have a lot to do, and we can’t stop work to eat our own meals, get coffee, etc. until the event ends (meaning that the speaking/presenting part is over). When some guy speaks for an hour fifteen and he was scheduled for 20 minutes, he may be disrupting scheduled meal times, breaks, even screw up the end of a day and send people into OT at great cost to the client. It can be aggravating and occassionally uncomfortable (if I’m programming the lights, I can’t really leave the lighting console to go to the bathroom, can I? I do many shows where I’m the only person in the room who can do what I do.).

But I’m also with you on the SOOTBB rules.

In my profession, we are there for the client; to help them have a great show, get done all the things they set out to sccomplish, and make it painless and easy for them. And for the most part, yeah, I leave the work at work.

Work is something I do to be able to afford my life; it is not my life.

19

This right here is the reason my previous job had security cameras in the kitchen. The first kitchen manager the owners hired ripped them off to the tune of several thousand dollars worth of meat packed out the back door :smiley:

(Okay, I know that’s not what you meant …)

I think my longest shift was 19 hours, though that was as a dishwasher. I’ve been in the restaurant business for 26 years, most of that as a cook. In 2005 I got laid off from my previous cooking job — I was the breakfast cook and the owner decided to stop serving breakfast — and with my unemployment about to run out I applied for a cook position at the local fancy hotel restaurant. They didn’t need a cook, but they needed a dishwasher. I really didn’t want to take a dishwashing job, but they mentioned 1) union job, 2) medical/dental/vision insurance, 3) paid vacations, 4) 401k retirement plan. I was about to turn 40, and I’d never gotten any of that at previous restaurant jobs, so I said, “Um, okay.” A month later I was transferred over to the city convention center next door, where the hotel was contracted to staff and coordinate events. I did that for two and a half years, and then when the #3 chef resigned last November to take a job elsewhere, I was promoted to take his place.

I still have long shifts, but the pay is much better and I have fairly definite ending times - usually an hour to an hour and a half after the last meal is served. When I was washing the dishes, the scheduled ending time for my shifts was basically just a wild-ass guess on the part of the executive chef when he was making up the schedule. My actual ending times were “whenever you’re finished”, so a lot of the time that meant I worked 1-4 hours longer than scheduled. Of course, that was balanced out by the fact that, even more often, I managed to finish up an hour or two earlier than expected. I did it by myself, too. With previous dishwashers, the chef would bring over extra dishwashers from the hotel to help out with the really big events. I put a stop to that, when I realized after a couple events that the extra people were just slowing me down because they didn’t understand my system. That, and there was the time my “helper” arrived after I had already been there for 13 hours. 90 minutes after he got there, amazed at how much work was involved, he said, “Well, I’m ready to go home!” After that I told the boss, “No more helpers. I can do it myself.” And I did (including washing up after groups of 800+ who were eating three meals a day, and having everything ready to go in time for each meal), which amazed everybody, to the point where I won Employee of the Month twice.