They Handed Me The Company's Fortieth Birthday And A Spreadsheet With Nothing On It

How I got the job

There was no job. That is the first thing to understand.

I was twenty six and I had been at the company for two years as the internal communications coordinator, which sounds important and meant that I wrote the birthday emails, ran the intranet nobody read, chased people for photographs of their dogs for the Friday newsletter, and yes, ordered the milk, because the office manager left and nobody replaced her and it fell into the gap where I was standing.

Then, in a Monday meeting in March, our managing director said, out loud, to a room, "It's our fortieth in October. We should do something properly."

And then he looked at me.

I have replayed that look many times. I do not think he meant anything by it. I think he looked at me because I was the person in the room whose job description contained the word "communications" and because I happened to be sitting where his eyes landed.

But everybody else in that room followed his eyes, and by the time they left, I owned it.

The spreadsheet

Somebody sent me a spreadsheet the next day. It was called Anniversary Planning and it had been created by a person who had left in 2019.

It had three tabs. Tab one had a single cell in it that said "Venue?". Tab two was empty. Tab three had a list of nine names, seven of whom no longer worked there.

That was my brief. That was the whole handover, for an event for six hundred people, with a budget that had not been set, on a date that had already been announced in an email that I had, with my own hands, written and sent.

I went to the bathroom and I sat in a cubicle for eleven minutes and I did some quiet, controlled, professional panicking, and then I came out and washed my face and went back to my desk and started a new document called WHAT I ACTUALLY KNOW, and the list was very short.

The three things

By April, after a lot of asking, I had worked out that this was not one thing. It was three things, and the reason I had felt so overwhelmed was that I had been trying to hold all three in one head at once.

There was the night itself. A hall, six hundred people, a stage, food, sound, seating, a running order, a man with a microphone who was going to talk for too long, and the ninety minutes in the middle where whatever we did would either land or die.

There was the story. Forty years of a company that started in a garage in Wynberg with four people. Almost everybody who could remember the early days was retiring. Two of them were unwell. That history was going to walk out of the door and not come back, and nobody, in forty years, had ever written it down.

And there was the boring, awkward, unloved thing that the technical director kept raising at every meeting, which was our safety induction, a forty minute session of a man clicking through slides that had been made in 2011, that every new employee sat through with dead eyes, and that everybody agreed was useless and nobody had ever fixed.

Three completely different problems, and they had all arrived on my desk in the same month, and I had done exactly none of them before.

What I got wrong first

I tried to do it all myself.

I want to say this clearly because I think it is the most common mistake made by people who are given something too big and are frightened of looking like they cannot do it. I did not want to ask for help, because asking for help felt like admitting I was twenty six and out of my depth, which I was.

So in May I booked a venue on my own, based on a website, without visiting it. It was beautiful in the photographs. When I finally went to see it in June, I discovered that the pillars in the middle of the room meant about seventy of our six hundred people would be looking at concrete. I also discovered that the loading access was a flight of stairs.

I cancelled it and lost a deposit that was not enormous but was enough that I had to tell somebody, and telling somebody was the hardest email I have ever written and also the best thing that happened to me that year, because the response from our finance director was one line.

She wrote: "Good. Now go and get help."

Getting help

I did not know how to buy this. Nobody teaches you.

I did not know what a production company was versus a venue versus a supplier. I did not know that "AV" was a whole world with its own people. I did not know that you brief an event management company with an outcome and not with a to do list, which is what I did in my first meeting, and I watched a woman across a table listen very patiently to me read out a list of tasks for twenty minutes before she asked me one question that stopped me dead.

She said, "What do you want people to feel when they walk out?"

I did not have an answer. I sat there with my list.

I went away and thought about it for two weeks. And the answer I eventually came back with was this: I wanted the people who had been there twenty years to feel seen, and I wanted the people who had been there twenty days to understand what they had joined.

That single sentence did more work than the entire spreadsheet.

The video

The story part terrified me the most, because it was the part where you can be worst.

Everybody has sat through a corporate video. Everybody knows the exact feeling of a room going polite and dead as the swelling music starts and the drone shot comes over the building.

What I wanted was old people talking. That is all. I wanted the four in the garage. I wanted the woman who had been the receptionist for thirty one years and who knew, genuinely knew, everything.

We ended up shooting it over five days, and I sat in on every single interview, which was the best week of my working life. I heard things I will not repeat. I watched an eighty one year old man cry in a chair in a warehouse talking about a bank that would not give him a loan in 1986. I learned that our founder's first office had no floor, just concrete, and that they used to put a paraffin heater in the middle in winter and take turns sitting near it.

I made mistakes. I over briefed. I gave the video production team a shot list of things I thought a video should have, all of it lifted from other companies' videos I had watched at midnight, and about half of it was garbage and they told me so, gently, on day two. The director said something to me that I have kept.

He said, "You keep asking for shots. Ask for moments."

The other thing, the boring thing

Meanwhile the technical director kept coming to my desk about his induction.

He was right and I was avoiding him. It was not glamorous. It was not the party. But he had a real problem, which was that our safety induction was so bad that people were not learning from it, and this is a company where people work with machinery, and the consequences of somebody not learning are not an awkward email.

The reason it was bad was that it was a man and a slideshow. You cannot show a process on a slide. You cannot show what happens inside a machine when a guard is removed. He had tried filming it and you cannot film it either, because you cannot demonstrate the dangerous thing safely, which is the entire point.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that this was a job for drawing rather than filming. When we finally briefed an animation studio I had to sit in a room for a whole afternoon while the technical director explained his own machinery to a person who had never seen it, and I watched that person ask him fifteen questions in a row that nobody at our company had thought to ask in eleven years.

That afternoon changed the induction more than the animation did. Somebody from outside made him explain, from first principles, why a thing was dangerous, and it turned out that even he had to go and check one of his answers.

The night

October. A hall in Sandton. Six hundred people. Round tables, a stage, and me at the back with a running order in a plastic sleeve and a headset that I did not know how to use and that I mostly used to breathe into.

I did not enjoy the first hour. I was watching the doors and counting empty seats and worrying about a table of eight that had not arrived.

Then the lights went down for the video.

There is a moment, about ninety seconds in, where the old receptionist says a thing about the paraffin heater, and she laughs, and she says a name, and there was a noise in that room that I have never heard before or since. Six hundred people making a sound at the same time, half laugh and half something else.

I stood at the back of that hall with a headset around my neck and I watched the faces, and I was not crying but I was very close to it.

Afterwards the managing director found me. He is not a warm man. He is precise and quiet and he does not do speeches to individuals.

He said, "Where did you find her?"

I said, "She's been here for thirty one years. She sits on the second floor."

He looked at me for a second and then he said, "Right," and he walked away, and about four months later I was promoted.

What I know now

I am thirty three. I have run a lot of events since then. Here is what that year taught me, and none of it is what I expected.

The hard part is never the logistics. The chairs will arrive. Somebody will always find you a microphone.

The hard part is knowing what you want people to feel, and being able to say it in one sentence to somebody who has never met your company, and then being humble enough to let people who do this for a living tell you when your idea is bad.

And the other thing, which I did not understand until much later, is that the two things I was most proud of that year were the two things that were not the party at all. They were a video of an old woman remembering a heater, and a piece of animation that shows a young man exactly what a machine will do to his hand.

Nobody claps for the induction video. Six hundred people did not make a noise when it played.

But it plays every month, to every new person, and it has been playing for seven years now.