Pass The Blame
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“As the best man in several recent weddings, sometimes it’s better to blame the staffers than the family.
At the most recent one, the mother of the bride was utterly insane and we had a couple small things that we noticed right away were going to go ‘wrong’ (they were fine, but the mother of the bride was going to go insane because it wasn’t the way she wanted it). So we grabbed the event manager and asked them if we could, with their assistance, put the blame on one random staffer.
So he called in a staffer on their day off, we paid her $300 in cash, and the mother of the bride chewed her out for a couple minutes while we look disappointed and then the mother of the bride ‘fired’ her from the event staffer company (which is just really funny to me that the mother of the bride actually thought she had the ability to unquestionably fire someone from a career at somewhere else and it would be totally accepted). The girl was in on it the whole time and said that if she could get paid for the entire day of work plus $300 for 45 minutes of work (including driving to the location), she would love it.
The rest of the time the mother of the bride would find things wrong and then say, ‘Well, this must have been that girl’s doing. I am glad I fired her because she was worthless,’ and we all just said: ‘definitely, great decision.’ Made the day so much easier. I really wish this was my idea, but it was the father of the bride’s idea. I can only assume he has done this in the past.”
One Inch Makes A HUGE Difference…
“This wasn’t us ruining the wedding, but we still got blamed for it. You see, I worked for a florist – I look back on them fondly as the sarcastic florists because that’s what my bosses were behind the counter. They were amazingly good at what they did, but they didn’t take ridiculous crap from people and if you were going to be a jerk they were going to riff sarcastically on you for months to come.
The biggest jerks were without fail the ones who were spending the most money. We had one family spending a ridiculous amount (something like 40k on the flowers alone) and the mother of the bride had the biggest meltdown I’ve ever seen. There had been a discrepancy in the type of candles ordered for the floral garland that went on a ledge around the room. My boss had written down from their initial consultation that they wanted 3-inch pillar candles to be placed in mini arrangements every few feet along the garland. The arrangements and garland were beautiful, but when we were there setting up the bride’s mother threw an absolute fit and insisted that they were supposed to be 4-inch pillar candles. It was the day of the wedding, we were in a remote resort town, and there was no way we would be able to get replacement candles in time. She insisted that they were too low and that the flames of the lit candles would sparkle too brightly in everyone’s eyes. She wanted us to comp the entire cost of the garland. My boss was super diplomatic and polite but didn’t back down and was like, ‘Um, no, not a chance.’
For months afterward he’d make constant jokes with us about it. He’d say things like, ‘Hey, do you know if the State laws have been updated yet? What’s the policy for how tall pillar candles have to be for a couple to be considered legally married?'”
Runaway Groom
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“The wedding planner ran off with the groom from my cousin’s wedding. The wedding planner was a guy. The groom was my cousin’s first love, first boyfriend and they were together for four years. What added some more trauma was that his and her family blamed her for that because there had to be something wrong with her which turned a perfectly normal boy into a gay. It was the weirdest, most melodramatic yet absurd event I ever been to. Ended up in me drinking a cold one with my poor, heart-broken and literally broke (the wedding was supposed to be huge) cousin in the loo. We left the party and she lived with me for 6 months before she got out of her depression and made her peace with the rest of the family (they hated me as well).”
Sometimes, The Bride Ruins Her Own Wedding
“I have catered over 100 weddings in my day and never really ‘ruined’ anything or had any big disasters but I have a story of a client ruining my night. The Bride was very insistent about having a non-traditional reception. She wanted a running ‘happy hour’ party where different food and drink stations came out throughout the day/night with no traditional sit-down dinner. In our last meeting with the clients and the wedding planner, everyone decided that it was important for the bride and groom to have a speech welcoming everyone and to briefly explain how dinner was going to work. On the day of the wedding, everything went south.”
This bride was putting on a $125k wedding and still managed to mess up her own day and then tried to pass the blame. Be sure to CLICK HERE to find out how!