MTV World Stage Live in Malaysia

Who’d ever guess that I was directly affected by the MTV World Stage Live in Malaysia concert. I organised a dinner last night at Sunway Pyramid Convention Centre and I was obviously too old to know that they were having an MTV concert right next door at Sunway Lagoon. Murphy’s Law – everything that could have gone wrong, did. However, we managed to recover gracefully.

First of all, the traffic was horrendous. As every tween was trying to get into Sunway for the concert, we were also directly affected by it. Everyone got stuck in the massive jam leading towards Sunway. Parking was a nightmare with people circling around for more than an hour to find one. Some of our guests did not turn up and even one VIP called to say that he was going home after failing to find any parking in the area for more than an hour.

So, we delayed the start of the event by about 30 mins.

We had solicited the help of several student members to help with the event, namely to help give out awards and to control the slide projection. However, due to the traffic congestion, they were late and I had to brief a number of substitutes at the last minute. I explained to the girls what they needed to do and in order to reduce the confusion, we would collect all the medals and certificates back so that we can sort out any last minute problems. As for the slides, I made them fool proof by simply numbering them in sequence, without any contextual knowledge required.

Never underestimate the ingenuity of fools.

As the event started, the computer that we used to control slide projection on the left side of the room – died. I had to rush to the front to get things fixed. The speaker’s slides were in that computer and he was coming on in 5 minutes. After fixing that problem, and beginning to breathe better, the computer on the other side of the room, died too. So, I quickly dashed across the hall to fix that problem too.

Thankfully, no other computers died after that. It was my fault for not having a backup on standby.

Then, as the speeches went off without a hitch, and the food came out, I got down to eating something because I had a feeling that things would still go wrong during the dinner. As the courses were served, we had a good time with the food. Everyone commented that the food was quite good – I selected the menu blindly and was just hoping for the best!

Then, came the time for the awards.

Although mostly uneventful, the emcee had a slight cock-up towards the end and I had to sort of predict and improvise things on the spot. Thankfully, I was able to be at two places at once – at the VIP table and at the awards table. Aside from that small problem, everything else proceeded smoothly. We could’ve done with a little drum-roll but that was about it.

I could’ve done well with a few other helpers to usher the award receipients, but no biggie.

All in all, the event went on pretty well. I had to say that it was quite a feat to have pulled it off. We had an organising committee of about 3 main people and we pulled off a 200 person dinner event in 5-weeks from start to finish. That’s not too shabby at all.