(This is the 9th Day of our “12 Days of the Ball 2008” series. Unfortunately, The Ball is now 4 days away making me many entries behind. Thanks for not getting on my ass about it. That’s one of the great advantages of having only three readers.)

Coat checks make me want to hang myself.

Yes, the innocuous coat check.  You pays your money and you get your ticket.  Seems simple enough. Who would have thought that during the early years of our events, they would be our kryptonite?

Coat checks, like bars, are staffed by the clubs themselves.  We don’t staff them, the employees who work them aren’t ours, and we don’t make any money from them.  Like baseball umpires, if they do their job well, no one notices them.

But when they don’t it’s a car crash with horrified people and twisted metal everywhere.

Our job, as I see it, is to try to prevent the disaster before it happens, by convincing the clubs before a big event to fully staff the coat checks and to keep the prices reasonable (we make this part of our contract with the club).  But it isn’t always easy because most clubs see coat checks as a minor detail not worth thinking about very deeply.  They don’t see what I see.  For I am shell-shocked and I have flashbacks.   I see the Ghosts of Coat Checks Past.

I see the times that I had to invade the sanctity of the coat check room myself, vigilante-style, and tell the startled workers that they may not know me but that I was there to help (and not to take their tips).  I see the time when I did that at one club only to find that the coat check was a dank unlit and unfinished basement cave and that the employees had failed to hang the coats in any semblance of numerical order.  Spent two hours with a flashlight, spelunking for outerwear.

Like this, only with shorter hair and a loincloth.

I see the time that I found that a restaurant/club had taken peoples’ coats (on New Year’s Eve) and, unbeknownst to them, had thrown them randomly across the kitchen table and floor.  Happy New Year. I see the time when there were many people waiting for their coats at a particular coat check, but no organized coat check line, so I spent hours, arms outstretched, a human stanchion sans the red velvet.

But mostly I see The Great Coat Check Disaster of 1997.

That year, for reasons I’ll likely explain in a future post, I had little choice but to move The Ball to the Tunnel, a huge but somewhat notorious nightclub.

Tunnel’s events director was my old nemesis, Monica (see The First Ball: A Tale of Terror) and Monica, unfortunately (and in my opinion), never showed any particular concern for whether or not an event ran smoothly.  I emphasized and re-emphasized that 3,000 - 4,000 people would likely attend this event and how important it was to the success of the event that the coat check was efficient.  And I’m pretty certain that I put in our contract that the coat check had to be fully staffed.

But I couldn’t escape the sinking feeling you have when you sense someone is only “yessing” you to death.  I was the Jewish Nostradamus foretelling coat check Armageddon.

I tossed and turned the night before the event, picturing masses of people swarming the coat check, ready to string me up with a scarf.   Unable to sleep I finally got up at 4 am-ish, got dressed, and took a taxi to the Tunnel (which was then open on weekends until something like 10 am the next day) to see their coat check in operation thinking it might relax me.  I did. It didn’t.

The first six hours of The Ball 2007 were, by any measure, a success.  We had our biggest turnout ever.  The Coney Island Circus Sideshow performed two shows and we produced two additional stand-up comedy shows in the Tunnel’s VIP Rooms, as well. Everything came together beautifully. Even Donny Vomit nailed it.

It’s really too bad that people were so insistent on retrieving their coats before they left.

Because the Tunnel had only hired 3 coat check people for nearly 4,000 guests. And they hadn’t provided any organized system at all for people to pick up their coats. I had proved that my spider sense was uncanny.  Also, I was screwed.

There was no way to handle the mass of humanity that swarmed the coat check booth. I tried the arms outstretched routine with the help of some our employees but we were soon swallowed whole.   We tried to get into the coat check booth so that we could assist but they wouldn’t let us in.  Management, to the extent they could even be located, claimed there was nothing they could do.  This was coat check hell.

They say there is a solution to every problem.  But this was my Kobayashi Maru - a no-win scenario (warning: geek reference).

And so, like a rat in a maze from which there is no escape, I eventually gave up.  I thought of the expression: “This too shall pass,” which, as it turns out (who knew?), originated from a Jewish folktale.  I wrote the apology I would send to our members the next day in my head.

I never worked with Monica again.  The owner of the clubs where she worked eventually got in a fair bit of trouble.  A few years later I saw her outside of Madison Square Garden when she was leaving a performance of the circus. She bounded across the street to greet me like an old friend.  It was fairly inexplicable.

We almost never have coat check problems these days because I refuse to work with clubs anymore that don’t show clear concern for the experience of our guests at an event. And the coat checks have run smoothly at The Ball (with only minor exceptions) for the past 11 years.

The Ball: Checking your coats smoothly since 1997.

No more crazy coat checks ever!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 2:47 pm and is filed under 12 Days of The Ball 2008, The Ball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.