Is your partner going to an overnight conference soon? I’m an events organiser – my stories of cocaine binges and threesomes in the loo will leave you insisting they come STRAIGHT home before the bar opens…

It’s ‘back-to’ season and, after the summer lull, work events and conferences are in full flow once more.

But if you think these are just stuffy brainstorming sessions, think again.

For 27 years I’ve been an events manager for big corporate clients, and it’s fair to say that many of the things I’ve witnessed won’t be featuring in the official end of year report… 

In fact, in my experience, there’s just as much sex, drugs and bad behaviour at work ‘off-site events’ as there is in the rock ’n’ roll industry.

One of the first events I ran, back in the early noughties, was for a corporate company that requested ‘something fun’ for staff and clients. They didn’t want a formal summer party, so instead we worked with a farmer in Hampshire and put on a festival-themed event.

We booked live music, bars and food carts, and encouraged camping and dressing up. There were more than 500 guests, and the company splashed out about £75,000 for this extravaganza.

But we hadn’t reckoned on the attendees behaving as if it was actually a festival and bringing in class A drugs.

By mid-evening, everyone was absolutely off their trolleys. Some people were even climbing into their cars and attempting to drive around the field, crashing into other people’s vehicles.

It was a nightmare. Health and safety had gone out of the window and nobody was listening to us.

I was convinced somebody would ring the police and we’d all be arrested. The only thing which staved off a panic attack was the security company we’d hired as an afterthought (thank God).

They stepped in, wrangled the idiots back to their tents and made sure their car keys were removed.

The farmer was very unhappy about the state of his field, though.

I was only 28, and I wasn’t experienced enough to cope easily with disaster.

Now I know that the key is to basically plan for carnage and work backwards.

People often assume that being an event manager means as much champagne as you can stomach, showers of freebies and presiding over Great Gatsby-style parties.

People see the fun, the music, and the trays of drinks and delicious food, but for those on the planning side, every event is exhausting and we need to be on constant alert in case things go wrong. I never drink while I’m working, and neither do any of my colleagues.

Even when things run smoothly, it’s rare that a drunk guest doesn’t try to steal something.

I’ve stopped people trying to sneak out with everything from bottles of Moet to huge, hand-made table-pieces full of feathers. Female guests often wander off carrying vases of flowers.

I remember one arguing: ‘Nobody wants them – it’s over!’ When I explained that her company had already arranged a van to deliver the flowers to a local hospice the next day, she showed no remorse but simply put down the flowers and stomped off.

I’ve seen people staggering away with enormous model props, including a life-size cutout of a footballer, taking down posters and even handing out expensive bottles of wine from a crate that had been placed behind a curtain.

These are professionals with well-paid jobs, but it’s as though after a few drinks they turn into hooligans.

I’ve never called the police, but I’ve occasionally been tempted. Admittedly, genuinely criminal behaviour is rare, but people tend to behave very badly in other ways when they’re away at a conference or overnight event.

It’s as though access to alcohol and being off-duty with colleagues gives them a free pass to act in ways they never would dream of at home.

I once watched a successful fiftysomething CEO give a warm speech about how he couldn’t have done it without his incredible wife. About an hour later he disappeared to his suite hand-in-hand with a 32-year-old from marketing.

In fact, bed-hopping happens all the time. A friend who runs her own events firm, working in the blue-chip corporate sector, told me about a conference she’d organised in Paris at a very posh hotel. On day two, during the keynote speech, a worried junior urgently called her to the loos, where she’d heard moaning and banging coming from a cubicle. She was worried that somebody was having a heart attack.

My friend whacked on the door and shouted: ‘What’s going on?’ There was a silence, and then not two but three attendees – the handsome Parisian product developer and two women, who she could only presume were his colleagues – all filed out, adjusting their clothes and giggling.

It’s usually a case of ‘what happens on tour stays on tour’. Even with smaller events, there’s often an atmosphere of liberation.

A few years ago we organised a team-building weekend for 12 trainee managers in the Lake District. They’d been working hard for months, and they saw it as a chance to let their hair down.

When they turned up for kayaking on the first morning very hungover, I knew what kind of weekend we were in for.

Though they didn’t know each other on arrival, by the second evening they were very familiar – at least two new couples were seen snogging in the hot tub.

The most eyebrow-raising situation I witnessed was at a very posh London hotel, after a big corporate Christmas party.

The management had all been gifted rooms overnight, and clearly some shenanigans had gone on. 

I’d been supervising the packing up and finally staggered to my room about 2am to find a young woman outside my door in only her lacy bra and pants.

She was very tipsy, and told me that she’d been popping back to her room for ‘protection’ after an unplanned ‘hook-up’ with her married colleague, but she’d lost her key card and forgotten his room number.

I called reception, gave her my jacket, got a new key card issued and escorted her back to her room where she fell into bed.

I’ve no idea what happened after that.

I try not to ask too many questions, discretion being a highly valued trait in my industry.

Usually if people are hopelessly drunk and become threatening or difficult, or drugs are on the premises, we call security and they deal with it, but over the years I’ve learned how to handle things myself.

On one occasion at an album launch party in a very hip London venue, we were using the back entrance to bring in deliveries from various scruffy vans, and I was surprised to see a shining black BMW pull up.

I went over to see who it was, and the driver beckoned me to get in the car. I realised, belatedly, that he was bringing the band’s drugs and had assumed I was paying.

I was not going to have my meticulously planned event railroaded by drugs, and a surge of adrenaline and rage saw me slapping his window and yelling, ‘Get out of my event, you little toerag!’

To my surprise, he shrugged and drove off, and I have to report that the band was unusually well behaved all evening.

Paula Cardwell is a pseudonym. Names and identifying details have been changed