Die Wurstmaschine; or, How Sausage Is Made David E. Barclay (bio) Interstate 75 north of Atlanta was a gigantic parking lot on that rush hour evening in September. Nothing was moving, and my car was stuck in the middle of it. To make things worse, the temperature was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (about 40 Celsius, for non-US readers). Suddenly my cell phone rang, confirming my worst fears. The delivery service that the GSA was using at the time had made a horrific mistake, and had not told us about it. The first half of all the names on the GSA membership list had received two copies of the conference program, while the second group of members hadn’t received any at all. What to do? And what on earth had I let myself in for? In the fall of 2005, as I was about to assume the office that Gerry Kleinfeld had so ably occupied for twenty-nine years, I remarked that, for the first time in my life, I actually felt a pang of empathy for Leo von Caprivi. As that unfortunate chancellor quickly learned, it’s not easy to follow a legend. Indeed, nothing could have prepared me for the reality of the job I assumed. Looking back at the past decade, much of my work as executive director has consisted of learning how to coordinate the production of a kind of intellectual and organizational sausage. Generally, one prefers not to know how the sausage is made when one goes to the grocery store or the Schnellimbiss. One just wants some assurance that quality is guaranteed. That’s what we try to do in the GSA. We’re happy if our members come to a smoothly functioning conference without noticing what’s gone into the sausage, or whether problems have arisen during its production. But the sausage-making machine has become increasingly complex in recent years, as we’ve grown from about 1,300 members to more than 2,300. So it might be useful to devote a few words to the sausage-making process, and to do so (I hope) without descending into a boring job description. I can’t possibly discuss all aspects of GSA sausage-making here. So let’s just look briefly at conference hotels. Among my various tasks, I’m ultimately the person responsible for the entire annual conference. The sausage making begins, of course, with hotel selection. These days, given the harsh reality of hotel economics and the dearth of affordable conference hotels that can meet our needs, we have to book hotels at least five years in advance. When I started, I knew nothing about the art of [End Page 669] negotiating hotel contracts, and even now they come with hidden surprises. When you book far ahead of time, you have to guess the number of rooms you’ll need, both for sleeping and for conference sessions. You need to anticipate travel costs and airport convenience. You have to schedule in various regions of the country. You have to worry about location and weather. You have to worry about troglodytic state politicians passing discriminatory legislation that could affect our members. You have to be prepared for last-minute negotiations for extra rooms, which sometimes are woefully inadequate for our purposes. You have to deal with the vagaries of trends in the travel business. You have to remind hotels constantly that we are academics with limited means, and have to work endlessly to keep costs under control. Sometimes you get it right, and sometimes you get it wrong. I’ve learned a whole vocabulary of hotel terms, from “pre-con” to “breakout” to “attrition clauses” to “force majeure” to “F & B minimums” to “BEO.” Even though we’ve tried to avoid problems, we sometimes get blindsided. There was the hotel that had double-booked our exhibitors’ space with a church group. There was the sales manager who accidentally entered the wrong dates for the conference into his calendar. There was the wedding party right in the middle of our sessions. There was the hotel that didn’t understand that we needed more bartenders for our receptions and more coffee stands for...
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