Stupid Girl

Even though Pacquiao vs. Mosley fight week is officially here the Grand Garden Arena actually has a convention client in house Monday and Tuesday so I spent part of my day dealing with that. We also had a meeting with Top Rank to hammer out some operational security issues with of the fight. We determined that the undercard fight camps will receive wristbands for access to a room with a closed circuit feed in order to watch the main event, muscled thru some in-ring sticker issues and dealt with managing all the celebs and VVIPs on the floor. Fun stuff. 

After the meeting I tried to catch up on some Billboard & UFC 130 estimates. I didn't get very far. It's amazing how quickly time flies when you've got a lot to do. A couple of months ago I lost my right hand gal Tara. She was my #2 for about 3 years I think. When she left to go start her event planning business, Scheme Events, I was so sad... but thrilled for her. She'd outgrown the arena about 10 months after she got there. She was that good. Now without her my days are longer and I'm trying to find ways of being even more efficient and automated. It's not that I can't handle the load now that she's gone, it's that I don't want to. She took care of all the stuff I didn't have the patience for and handled the people I didn't have the patience to deal with. You have no idea how valuable she was to me for simply those reasons. I had a level of trust with her that I doubt I'll ever find with another colleague in that role. I don't like to call her my assistant because she wasn't. It was a true collaboration, at least in my eyes. I hope she saw it that way too. 

Earlier in the day Zippy wanted me to meet this girl he thought might be a good candidate to replace Tara. We went up to Starbucks with her, grabbed a drink and chatted at the food court. She's definitely not a Stupid Girl. Apparently she was a female rap star on YouTube, had tats under her professional yet fashionable outfit and had her own event business for a while. She's certainly driven but I'm not sure she's the one. Finding a #2 is not easy - at least for me. I'm pretty particular. Funny, a lot like my selectiveness in finding a man. I think she had 'star-fucker' in her eyes. People think this job is all about watching shows and meeting celebs. It's not. Most of my time is spent doing mundane things, dealing with incompetent clients & irate guests, listening to irrational employees and funneling emails, massive amounts of emails - it's pretty rare I actually watch more than a song or 2 of a concert and even more rare that I actually meet an artist. Of course there are events like award shows or mega-fights where I get to do both but those don't come around often, and I've been doing this for awhile. She's not going to be handling any meet & greets or seeing any part of the Paul McCartney concert in her first year. I don't know. Maybe I'm being too hard on her. 

I capped off the night with some of my favorite fight boys at Seablue. I was going to go up to the bar for dinner with a friend but that fell thru earlier in the day. Around 7.30p I get a text from Brener telling me to get my ass up to Seablue for dinner with the boys. So of course I did... come on, I couldn't be rude.