With a Side of Ick, Please

In the real life, not the one you see here, I have a real job. I'm an event planner and that used to mean being involved in large scale, international events, travel to five star hotels, the finest foods, and generally working my ass off for 14 hours a day. But the rewards were pretty fucking sweet.

Nowadays it just means dealing with caterers, and not even the high end kind. I miss spreads of Kobe beef and a bottles of Veuve Clicquot, meals that cost more than my annual salary. But I still do get vendors kissing my ass.

Last week I let one dazzle me with her fancy organic concoctions. She fell within budget, the food was actually tasty, so I ordered it for an event I had later in the week. Great, I love it when there's no thinking involved. I should have been wary that this was too easy.

The food showed up a day early. Their screw up, so they comped us lunch and then brought it fresh again the next day. It's really good food, so I decided to give them another chance and ordered again for a luncheon this week.

Now here's where I have to back up and explain that all my clients are lawyers. Mostly a cranky, high maintanence, litigious sort of group. They take a special kind of velvet glove to handle. Not a problem. I've had to hand-hold CEOs of Fortune 500 companies before, this is cake. Unless something goes wrong, of course.

A perk of the job (besides the constant ass kissing, of course) is the free lunch we get every day there's an event. But I'm usually so busy running around, that I don't get to eat until the program ends. So when I sat down to this meal, I was starving and exhausted, as usual. I was three bites into my fancy turkey wrap, when one of my coworkers suddenly started freaking out. I've always joked that "organic" just means there are bugs in your food, but seriously, there was a dead bug in her food. And not a tiny one either.

Then I found hair in my fruit salad. Two strands of stick-straight black hairs, so you know it wasn't mine that fell in there.

Yeah, I don't think I'll be using that caterer again. The sales rep apologized up and down, did everything short of throwing actual cash money in my face to keep from losing my business, but what can I do? Imagine if one of my lawyers had found that in their food instead of just me and a coworker? That's a liability I simply cannot afford.

No matter how much they kiss my ass.