Assignment #2-Vincent Davis

Towards the end of spring semester last year my parents convinced me to help them plan and then DJ my younger brother’s eighteenth birthday party. They had procured a classic mansion for the night and they hoped to transform the main room into a ‘dance club’ for the evening.

The party was to happen the day after I came home for the summer, so all of the planning had to be done either on the phone or over the internet. It wouldn’t have been all that difficult of a task if my parents weren’t so against technology (who needs e-mail?), so in essence there was only one interaction process involved, the telephone.

I was responsible for organizing and setting up the lights, sound system, and then actually DJ-ing the party. My parents were back in Lockport taking care of the catering or whatever other things parents do when planning a ‘super sweet 18’ party and I was in Ithaca. My task of organizing the dance floor proved to be a very loosely coupled in relation to the other aspects of the party planning. I stayed in sporadic contact with my parents mostly via short text message questions on the details of the night; set up and tear down times, dinner schedule, would we need music during dinner, etc…

Because of the loose coupling of responsibilities I was able to take care of my responsibilities and they were able to cover what they needed to. The night I came home we went over the final schedule for the next day and the event went off without a hitch, since we had basically planned the dinner part of the night separately from the after hours part of the night, and there was very little overlap with the two parts the distance between us had very little effect on the event.