Hosting Horror Stories
It is time for me to unpack real life horror stories from fainting at gigs to being ignored by organisers.
1) Fainting at 40 °C
Listen up folks, being in a closed-off room filled with 400 people inside in June with no air conditioning (it was broken) for 10 hours was - BONKERS. The inside temperature had reached 40 °C! I finished my job on day 1/2, calmly walked to one of the first responders and asked
“Hi, do you guys happen to have anything sugary?”
”No, sorry. Are you not feeling well?”
Next thing I knew I was lying on the floor, legs up in the air, my shirt soaked through with sweat and dehydrated as heck. After a short hospital visit I came back on day 2/2 to finish my job.
Lesson learned: no matter the occasion, please take breaks and please stay hydrated.
2) Being ignored by the organiser
I get it. Being an organiser is tough work and often a labour of love more than a true labour bringing in loads of profit if you’re not one of the big players. Nonetheless, if you are asking someone to host your event, for the love of god, don’t ignore us. We’re not only representing your event, but also that community and You, the organiser.
I was invited to host an event, yay!
Once I arrived at the location the organiser had clearly seen me, but had not greeted me. They only talked to me at the END of the event for whatever reason (I still do not have a clue until this day, despite receiving good feedback). To say that I was shocked was an understatement. People are busy, things happen, and I’m not mad about you just not recognising me at first glance due to stress. My issue in this setting was that I had also not received a briefing AT ALL either. So I arrived at my job like it was my first day at school and nobody had told me what class I belonged to, who my class teacher was and where I was supposed to be.
I’m a host, not a magician. You can’t expect me to know your local VIPs I should mention, how you designed your (dance) battle tree, how long and how many rounds you were planning, breaks you’d like to include, etc. I can only communicate what I know! (Still mad about it to this day)
3) You’re an all inclusive package
I already mentioned it before. Sometimes being a host comes with the assumption that we know everything about somebody else’s event. Surprise - we don’t! One of my biggest “shaking my head” moment was when I hosted a battle where I wrote down the dancers for a preselection 5 minutes before we started….3 TIMES (once for each judge). This could have been an honest mistake and for that I would have had empathy. So what was I mad about that time?
There was a person that had been specifically assigned to be my person to reach out to in case of questions concerning the participants, battle trees and battle format itself. That person was gone for 30 min and only arrived 5 minutes before we started only to ask ME if I had already written down the preselection dancers. They also continued to ask me how the preselection will go and to be frank, that was the moment I gave up. I went downstairs to the girls sitting at the entrance who had carefully jotted down all the dancers’ names who had signed up for the dance battle, asked for the list and created the preselection list followed by all top 8 or whatever trees afterwards.
I stopped asking and went into “repair” mode. That’s when my brain goes into a state of emergency but becomes highly functional. I was mad. I stayed mad, but that was not something the crowd had to know. I still hope they haven’t found out to this day.
4) High as a kite
I don’t drink any alcoholic beverages when I host (I actually rarely drink anyway), but I also don’t smoke (I never smoke). Now what does that have to do with a horror story? Imagine trying to get briefed by someone who is high as a kite. Not the relaxed kind of high, but the philosophical absent kind of high. The sort of high where sentences stop making sense and where conversations would only work if a) they would speak in my direction and b) I was in that same universe as the person I was talking to.
As hosts we often work under high pressure. When things don’t go as planned, we are the ones who’ll go into fixing mode so the crowd does not catch on. Many times the quality of our performance has to suffer due to insufficient information, high expectations, and miscommunications. I take my job seriously, even if it’s just a small community event.
The things I expect from myself, I also expect from those who hired me and unfortunately, sometimes find that although their dreams are beautiful ones, they lack the responsibility to truly take over instead of hand over.
To the future generation of hosts
I hope my horror stories have not scared you! Instead I hope that you are able to gain perspective from someone else’s experiences. I hope that you won’t have to go through tough scenarios like these and yet I do believe that all “oopsies” are great opportunities for you to learn.
I hope that you will always host with a sense of respect and love for the community. There have been people, mentors, and pioneers before you that have paved the way for you. I am grateful for every opportunity I have gotten so far. This post is not here to tell you that hell has broken loose.
I enjoy hosting. I love bringing people together and it has been an incredible experience so far to be recognised as “MAMA SOSO”. This also comes with a great sense of responsibility for me. I have stayed silent in most occasions, because my emergency brain had not allowed me to process the situations enough to understand that sometimes I had been treated poorly.
From here on, I see it as my duty to speak up. Not only for me, but for all who will come after me.
I am excited to meet the new generation of hosts and share the stage with them/give the stage to them!
BE BOLD,
Soso