booking a conference room

We got in at 8AM as usual w/this boss-led work days. I tried to step up my workload more in the beginning of the audit and did a lot of work during the day outside of trying to find a conference room to work in w/my group. This next story is comical and almost downright stupid.

We have a team which "helps us" in our EY audits to gather information. Unfortunately the key people aren't even proficient in doing this. We gave the guy a simple task, book a conference room for us so we could work for 3 weeks straight in a big enough room for 3 people. We first emailed him weeks back and he didn't respond. After we emailed him directly ONLY about that item, he then finally said he'd taken care of it (he could've thought it was just for the opening meeting, but he is sox auditor, he knows we need a room; we basically do similar things to their group.)

We show up around 10:30 to the office's building as we had a meeting at corporate. My man is nowhere to be found. We asked the security guard to see if any rooms were booked in his name, but he couldn't find any. Luckily, our IT audit team sits in that building, so we went over and asked them to look up the schedule; they didn't see anything either. We ended up sitting in the old manager's vacant office (3 of us) and working from there in the interim.

@ around 11:15, my man called up and we told him about the problem; he didn't seem to realize and understood that we need a room to work out of. We told him to get on dat, and he agreed to have it done by the end of lunch; we could just work from the manager's room until then.

We get back from lunch at Great Taste (a chinese restaurant in New Britain that's pretty good) and saw my man in his office and said hi. He asked us first, "Hey, so are you all set w/the office, or do you need my help?" WHAT?!?!?!?!? I knew he wouldn't do it for us, but that he'd be so clueless or arrogant (had to be super clueless). So we said by the end of our meeting at 2:00, we'll look on the 3rd floor (where most of the business people sit).

During the meeting, he said, "So there are some open items, and the auditors don't have a room to work in." hahahahaha, one guy looked at him, laughed then slowly realized he was telling the truth and said, "Wait, that's actually a problem?" "Well yes" HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA So he suggested going to a woman who knows a lot about the open rooms on the 3rd floor apparently; unfortuntately, she didn't know of anything consistently open over 3 weeks. Not a surprise since it was the same day of the start of that freaking period.

We go down, and he tells us he'll do some research. 2 hours later he shows up w/a piece of paper. It's the schedule of the one conference room the lady mentioned and he goes on to explain to us that it's only open certain times each week and is going through the schedule like we give a damn. HAHAHA It's comical how dumb this is; it's been like 6 hours and we have no conference room. We tell him, you do the same stuff as us when you look at businesses, and he says, "yes, of course". He goes on to say, "You know, if we had done this a couple weeks ago, there would be no problem; I checked before and they were all open." AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I don't even know what to say here. Did he say that to make it sound like our fault? LIke we didn't mention it to him? Just super dumb...

Eventually, he says we'll have to get a room on the 5th floor, so we go up w/him and he looks around, doesn't know a thing and can't open any of the locked offices. So... why did we come up here w/you???

The end of the story is, the next time we went up, he did what he shoudl've done before we went up the first time.

The long frustrating day w/my man ended w/a delicious dinner at Ginza. Also, Ivan hooked me up w/the choco's that i ordered from him (VIA BELGIUM!!!!) I ordered a Del Rey Box of Pralines... FREAKING GOOD. And plenty of bars of cote d'or. Holler at me if you want some... I still have them to this day!!!

P.S. unfortunately I took my 2 coworkers' chocos, now i'm stuck w/them, out a couple bucks and have to figure out a way to get it to them.