What happened at the convention's front desk
While this happened at a hotel where a convention was being held, it isn't a hotel tale. But I think you'll appreciate the situation.
I and several friends were involved in a local gaming convention in the 1990s. We were mainly involved for a Live-Action Role-Playing game we were play-testing, but we got asked to join the volunteers helping to run the convention.
See, this convention had been owned by a local guy, who over-extended himself. He sold the con to a law firm from out-of-state, but the law firm had never run a convention before. Once they were introduced to our plucky band of volunteers, a few requests came my way.
One request was that I used my desktop-publishing skills to produce a nicely-formatted file for the guide to events people could sign-up for. 760
This would be included in the mailed materials to people who registered for the convention.
Another request was to have a computer-based registration system. See, the lawyers had been used legal pads, one sheet for each event, to track who had signed up for events when they registered, but they wanted to have a computer at the convention's front desk so they could do this electronically. I was up late the night before, loading in all the information on the attendees and the events, so the database was current, and I got up in time to set up the computer at the front desk for the convention owners, who decided to handle all the registration stuff themselves.
The only problem was that they felt it took too long to have one computer for the registration sign-up stuff, so they decided -- without asking me about it -- to put out the yellow legal sheets on a nearby table so people could "also sign up that way."
You can guess what happened next.
Folks running events had extra people show up they didn't know about. People complained about paying for a game that didn't have space for them. It was a total mess.
Fortunately, none of the over-registration issues came back to us volunteers. But we decided we weren't going to volunteer for next year. 760