Mix It Up

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I believe this situation doesn’t happen very often, but I have been in this position before so it is worth mentioning. You have been told you will be staying at a certain hotel, and when you start a dialogue with them about getting internet access set up you figure out pretty fast that they don’t really want to work with you.

No, they don’t have more bandwidth. No, they won’t let you bring in outside access. No, you can’t have access to their cable infrastructure. You’re lucky they are letting you stay there, don’t you know?

Guess what? It’s time to have a real “heart to heart” talk with the people that picked this as your home away from home. If it’s the only game in town, then refer back to my earlier post here. It is difficult to set up a really functional war room if you just have to hunker down. If this hotel is NOT the only game in town, then you need to find a new home. Seriously.

I can promise you that there are other hotels that would be thrilled to have a contract with a law firm for a block of rooms and some amount of time. They actually want you to be there and want to ensure that you can get what you need. Since you’re going to be a good citizen and play nice in their sandbox, they would love to have you stay and work with them instead.

I wasn’t kidding when I said I have had to deal with this before. We scrambled to find another location to stay, canceled our contract, and found a new place that turned out to be fabulous and where we would be happy to go again.


I can’t and won’t go into details. I’m just saying that these situations need to be a win/win and working with someone that doesn’t understand that is probably not going to go well. Mix it up, talk with the powers-that-be and decide to look for an alternative.

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