What happens when the venue Wi-Fi dies

Ask anyone who's run a big event what they worry about the night before, and the door is usually somewhere near the top. Hundreds of people arriving at once, nearly all in the first half hour, every one of them forming an opinion of your event before they've properly walked in. It's the one moment of the day you can't have over again.

So here's a fair question to put to anyone handling your check-in: what happens if the venue internet drops?

Because it does. Conference centre Wi-Fi gets swamped the moment a thousand phones land on it at nine in the morning. A connection somewhere has a bad day. It's nobody's fault and it's completely out of your hands, and with a lot of systems it means the queue grinds to a halt at the worst possible time.

With ours, it simply keeps going. People still get checked in, badges still print, the line keeps moving, internet or no internet. The moment the connection comes back, everything quietly sorts itself out on its own. You don't have to spot it happening, and you certainly don't have to fix anything. As far as your guests can tell, nothing went wrong at all.

There's a smaller thing we're stubborn about, too. If a badge doesn't print, for whatever reason, the person at the desk sees it there and then. Nobody gets quietly missed and only discovered an hour later when they come back asking where their name tag went. The little problems show up while they're still easy to sort out.

None of this is glamorous, and that's rather the point. The best thing a check-in desk can do is be completely forgotten — people walk in, get their badge, go and find a coffee, and never once think about how it worked. That only happens when it's built for the morning the Wi-Fi lets you down, not just the mornings it behaves.