Only XL

I was presented with a scenario of deja-vu at this morning's training session for an upcoming mega event over next week.

The training started well, with an overall briefing and walk-through conducted by the main officer-in-charge. But it went wrong at the outset of the distribution of passes and gear.

'Your names are not in the list? Oh, just write down your particulars after the last row.'

'Sorry, your passes are not with me yet. They are sent here in batches.' (Sorry, but where's the logic?)

'You need a M or S sized shirt? Oh, I only have XL ones!'

I could only observe from a distance and smile wryly. I have been through this before.

During another mega event in 2006, my fellow workers and I were promised early on individually tailored suits and this got everyone substantially excited.

On the day of the fitting (for the suits), it started to go sour.

The vendor asked us to pick up, from a clothes hangar, the off-the-shelf jacket and pants that best suit our build. I can see in the others' eyes the disbelief: Is this considered tailor made?

After one picks out the best fitting but not quite fitting jacket or pants, the vendor will gauge and take down the adjustments that needs to be made, lengthen an inch on the sleeves, reduce an inch on the waist and etc, which I thought was totally nuts. I mean, you take down these number of measurements, you might as well measure our build properly, which isn't much more additional work. By using add-on measurements, it becomes a dynamic process because whatever you plus or minus on one end may affect the other.

True enough, the vendor confused themselves and everybody else. The very week before the event starts, most of us have not received our suits and for those we did, the measurements were wrong and most of these suits were returned to the vendor for alterations, for which they had no time for.

The situation was tense and got so bad that that the big bosses of the event had to appear and apologise to every one. Just to ensure that the event could go on, the instruction became 'you wear your own suit or you make your own alterations to the official ones'.

The show went on quite successfully but the taste in everyone's mouths was sour.