Frankie Says Relax

At long last, after 3 weeks of the kind of manic schedule usually reserved for Amy Winehouse on a bender, I have a moment or two of free time to bask in the success of my event. This morning was the long awaited Media Breakfast which I have been working flat out on. It's been intense, stressful and I have absolutely loved every minute of it.

I particularly love that everyone came up to me at the end with satisfied nods and sincere congratulations, and that news around the office has spread so that us lot who worked our asses off to make it happen have been given all due credit. It's very different from my time in Cape Town's Stills Production industry, which had me working just as hard, if not harder, but was an entirely thankless job. Production co-ordinators are the last people to be thanked - if they ever are - and they are the last people to receive any credit. That is reserved for the fahhhhbulous art directors, the seductively gorgeous models and the "overworked" agency reps, whose most difficult dilemma is deciding whether to have the smoked salmon or the caviar for breakfast.

My company is a very different place, and it means those of us working on the Marketing Events can thrive in an environment where hard work is recognised, rather than just expected.

Of course, that doesn't mean everything went 100% smoothly! What would an event be without a little bit of home-grown panic? Despite getting up at 5:10am and arriving at the Paramount Club (31 floors up with spectacular views across London) for 6:30 to give ourselves 2 hours to set up, we still found ourselves at 8:15am doing damage control with the presentation as earlybird guests started to arrive. The crux of the matter was that some sort of system overload was causing a loud buzzing sound everytime we connected the sound system to the laptop. This was elimated by pulling out the laptop's power cable.

So it was down to me to pick the lesser of two evils: have an unprofessional and distracting sound throughout the hour-long pitch or risk humiliation and the CEO's wrath should the powerless laptop die mid delivery. Luckily, Denny the IT guy and I are nothing if not resourceful, and although I will admit to a mild panic-related stroke at around 8:25, we came up with a viable solution. There were 5 videos embedded in the PowerPoint file. We plugged everything in as needed, and muted the sound. At my signal on the slide prior to each video, Denny was to pull out the power cable and unmute the sound via remote control, just in time for the video to play. Not an ideal thing to be doing mid presentation to media professionals, but we were pretty certain we could pull it off.

I was also responsible for following the script and clicking the slides accordingly. At 9am, everybody took their seats and our CEO kicked things off with a welcome speech. Denny was seated next to me and we were both poised to put our make or break plan into action. The first 10 slides were pleasantly soundless. Then we got to the slide before the first video. My heart was going at 3 hundred miles an hour; if I could have made a noise I would have been hyperventilating like a Britney paparazzo, but that would have been most unseemly. I forced down the urge to run screaming from the room, and signalled Denny. Deep breath...and presto! Video and sound running as expected. Enormous inward sigh of relief. A few more slides, and then the second video. Perfect. Hey, this isn't so bad! 3 slides before the third video, I notice Denny's remote has gone on standby. Instead of waiting til the pre-video slide, I signalled him an extra slide early. And thank all that is holy that I did. I could only watched in abject horror as Denny pulled out the power cable and turned up the volume...only it didn't turn up. The remote was frozen. On autopilot, I clicked on the final slide before the video and imagined my preciously built reputation crashing down around me as Denny reset the remote with about 5 seconds to spare. As the presenter introduced the video, my finger moved over the mouse button for the final click, and in slow motion I saw the remote kick back to life as my finger bore down on the button. With a fraction of a second to spare, the volume went up as the video started. The next three videos after that one were fine, but my nerves will never quite recover their former elasticity.

The adrenaline has finally worn off, and I am crashing like a mack truck on a hairpen bend. But it was brilliant, and as soon as I've knocked off early today and gotten some sleep, I'll be ready for the next one.