You Gotta Lotta Nerve

I know I've been away awhile.

To say I have been working like a slave is an understatement. Even while working long hours I agreed to help plan a co-workers mother's 80th Birthday Party for next month. I began the planning in August. Everything was going smoothly. I created a plan for the party with my tasks and my co-workers tasks. This is going to be an easy event I thought.

The party will take place at Dulan's Catering and Banquet Hall. That meant the location and food have been taken care of in one swoop. Great! All I need to do now is some decoration and invitations. The theme of the party is "This Is You're Life" sort of like the old television show. The Happy Birthday Banner has been ordered, I custom made vases for the centerpiece with a then picture and now picture of her mother on each side of the square vase. The vase will hold yellow roses her mothers favorite and in her favorite color. I created the invitation and a save the date notice. The save the date notice informs the invitee of the date of the party and also of the memorable gift that we'd like to create for her mother. The gift is a book that all the invited guests will help in creating. It will include anything that the guests would like to send whether a note or picture from past or present. The gift will be presented at the party.

On countless occaisions I have asked this woman what her budget for the party is. Each time she has not wanted to tell me. So therefore I have been trying to do things in the most cost-effective ways as possible. When people don't want to give you a budget that means they don't want to spend a lot of money or they don't want to give you any money up front. I should have stopped right there and not done the event until a budget was defined. My mistake!

At any rate I do really like this woman. However, she can be something else at times. The invitations went out two weeks late meaning Sept 15th because she would not get stamps for the invitations or save the date notices. She hadn't even provided me with the guest list. So by the time she did get stamps and all to me, I had to mail everything in one package. I told her at that point that I thought that one stamp would not be enough postage to send these.

"Oh yes it will my husband is a retired postal worker and he said it was enough". she sharply responded.

"Maybe we should get them weighed just in case." I said.

With a look of I know what the hell I'm talking about she said, "You need to hurry up and get the invitations out."

Ok I'll mail them in the morning. And that I did, with the one stamp. This past weekend she called me to say that she had called several people and they had not received the invitation yet. Well if there wasn't enough postage on them maybe it's taking a little longer to arrive or they'll be sent back to us. Today they arrived back needing 48 more cents of postage. Before they arrived in the mail I frantically spent a couple of hours creating a new apology invite to send right away. Right after I got them printed this morning is when the original ones arrived from the post office.

Now this woman had a tone in her voice that I am very familiar with. It's that tone you messed up and are ruining this event. I tried not to react to that, because I know that she was just nervous about the party. She left me with the feeling that it was all my fault. That was pissing me off.

I wasn't going to react because if she wasn't being so cheap and slow to get her things together then this would never have happened. Now I'm waiting for her to get me more picutures so that I can create a slide show presentation that will show throughout the party. This is because all those that she has asked to speak at the party have all declined.

So there we were adding additional stamps to the packages, including the apology for the late notice to the package. When she says jokingly, I'm taking this work out of your pay.

Now I don't need this money. Planning parties is something that's fun for me. But lawd help me not to go off on this woman and tell her that her shit is raggedy and if she tries not to pay me our agreed upon amount that I will sue her fat black wannabe grand ass for this discounted amount she is paying me!! (And trust me she is not grand at all.)

Ok now I got that out so I'll be fine now. However, I have learned one lesson not to let a client get away with not having a budget or getting half the money upfront.

I'm still going to make it a very nice event for her mother. It's not her fault she has an ignorant daughter. Or is it??????????