Bargaining

Every day that I go into work, I participate as an agent in a triangle-like arrangement.  I work for the iHotel and Conference Center, and so a lot of our events are weddings and banquets and the like.  During the event, I must coordinate the guest's wants with our facilities capabilities.  Things can get really complicated on weekend nights, which is usually when we'll host weddings.  There is no fury like that wrought by the bride's mother.  So as you can imagine, it is very important in these situations to not only make sure that the bridal party is happy with the arrangements but it is also necessary to make sure that the wedding isn't interfering with any other events that may be ongoing.

For example, there was a wedding one time where the DJ brought in some of the biggest speakers that have ever been inside the Conference Center.  He said they were meant for outdoor concerts but they were all he had available that night.  When he turned them up and started playing music, every light in the building was rattling, the glass on the doors was shimmering from the vibrations, and every other event in the Conference Center at the time came to the front desk to ask what the hell all the noise was from.  In that case, we had to tell the DJ to keep it a little quieter until later in the night when the other events were done.  For the most part though, I, acting as the agent, will usually satisfy the bridal party over the concerns of our other events because it is such a 'special' day for them.

However, things get really interesting when we have two weddings go on at the same time.  Now, I have no options where I don't impinge on someone's special day.  This is a worst case scenario because after I have gotten done arbitrating the two parties, neither one feels satisfied and both feel that I am to blame.  This leads to me altering my behavior so that I can prevent bad things from happening before they happen, even if that prevention looks intrusive to someone that isn't aware of the future possibilities.  For example, if one wedding has an open bar and one wedding has a cash bar, then there have been times where people will crash the other wedding, get free drinks, and then bring them back to the original wedding.  In order to prevent this, I can stand in the hallway between the two weddings and not allow people to go on the other side.  This can seem intrusive and arbitrary to those who I turn away, but it is necessary because I am prevents a much larger problem.

In this example, the way that people would choose the arbitrator would be to shop around at different conference centers or banquet halls, and the way that the arbitrator could choose their clients would be to accept or decline any events from those people.  I feel that this situation is rather common and can be applied in many places, such as the labor market, internal organizational policies, and governmental initiatives.

Thoughts on Future Income Risk

As I was progressing through high school, I was told repeatedly that the point of going to college was to prepare myself to join the workforce and to give myself a head start in life.  It made perfect sense to me at the time, and I still think it is good advice.  But I had missed the essence of the advice.  It wasn't necessarily what courses I took or what grades I got that would give me that head start.  Sure, these things are important and are going to be used as a metric for evaluation in the future.  But preparing for the workforce?  The head start in life?  That was from living through the experience:  having to learn things that were so new that every sentence seemed like gibberish, or learning that failure is part of the process of growing.  However, this experience comes with a pretty high cost, and it is up to those who choose to go to college to make sure that we minimize our future income risk while we increase our human capital.

Coming into college, I did not have a lot of money to throw around.  I had gotten enough money from the school to pay for the tuition and some of the housing costs of living at the dorms, which was mandatory for freshman.  As a result, I had to take out loans to pay for the rest of the dorms as well as books and other incidentals, which totaled several thousand dollars in loans.  The following year, my scholarships from the university were reduced, and so I had to take out even more loans as well as pick up a part-time job.  This is when I started to really contemplate the long-term costs of going to college.  At this rate, if I didn't start really excelling in my classes and networking like crazy, it might not have been worth coming here.

In order to try to minimize the debt that I was accumulating, I would work full time over the summer and save up money that I could use throughout the school year.  I would then keep a part-time job during the semester to also lessen my loan burden.  For every dollar that I could save up over the summer, I would save more than a dollar in interest by not taking it out in loans.  In addition, I would get jobs at companies that would look good on my resume so that I could network as well as save up money for school.  For example, I was an office assistant at a law firm for 3 summers.  The pay was about average, but I was able to network with professionals in my field as well as having the benefit of having a law firm on my resume.

As far as older relatives go, I have a cousin that is 6 years older than me and took a similar path: graduated high school, then went to college for 4 years using loans and working part-time.  She was okay with her debt upon graduation and for a few years afterwards.  However, she ran into trouble about 5 years out of graduation when she bought a car, new furniture, and got a new apartment all within the same year.  This put more strain on her than she thought it would and as a result, she had to work a second job, all but sacrificing the sacred "mid-twenties" social life.  I will definitely keep this in mind post-graduation as complacency seems to blame here.