Party Gate crasher

Well, there was an incident at work yesterday that has woken me up from my slumber in the blogosphere. Here goes.

The current Business Unit that I belong to, had wanted us to conduct an event for the 700+ employees in the Unit in Chennai. As most of you would be aware, such employee engagement events are conducted by different Units at different locations quite regularly at various points in a calendar. I was appointed as the head of the Organizing committee and the D-day was yesterday, the 19^th of September. As a precursor to the event, we took out a rally within campus last week, with a professional marching band and holding banners.

We had hung up banners at many places on campus advertising that the event was on 19^th September. The tag line for the event (courtesy yours truly) was “Family. Friends. Fun.” During the course of this week, we had informed our Unit employees that they were allowed to bring their family to campus, but with a pre-registration. Family members were allowed to enter the campus after 3 PM.

Yesterday, while we were running around with the arrangements for the event, we got a call from our Security desk that there was an employee who had brought in some family member and wanted to be let inside. The time was just about 11 AM. As mentioned earlier, we were allowing family members only after 3 PM and so the Security guys had called us to see if we had any special permission for early entries.

So, we went around contacting the HR and other senior people who run the Campus to get approvals. That seemed to be running into some delays and the Security officer called us again. Finally, we asked the guy to find out who was the employee who had brought in his family. The Security officer gave us the employee number and we looked him up in the Office Directory.

Guess what? This employee belonged to some other Unit altogether!!!! He had seen the Rally last week; saw the banners around Campus and also some of the video displays we had run in Buildings. The dude assumed that this event was a free-for-all and happily brought along his family! We were literally ROFL and the one speaking to the guy had to put on a straight face. She asked some one simple question as to whether that guy got an invitation by mail and he said no. We then explained to him that what we were doing was just a brand-building exercise and the event was only for our Unit members.

After we were done with the welcome laughter at a stressful time, we also felt pity for the dude who would now have to cut a very sorry face to his family. God knows what he suffered back home.

And BTW, the event was awesome!