My daughter's wedding dinner

A big thank you to all my relatives and friends for their kind support in attending the wedding dinner of my daughter, Amy. If not for them the event would not have succeeded according to plan.

When we planned and budgeted for a 20 table dinner function we had some misgivings if all the dinners in the guest list would come and whether the angpow receipts would be sufficient to pay for the cost of hosting the dinner. We were not interested to make money out of the function. We would be happy if the receipts would be sufficient to break even with the cost of the dinner.

By 7.00pm, the schedule time of the start of the dinner only half the tables were filled and we were wondering if we should cancel some tables. Then after 7.30pm more guest started to trickle in and we became more hopeful as the guests started to fill up the vacant seats.

It was only after the dinner had started that we realised why so many guests arrived late, after the scheduled time. The severe traffic congestion in many parts of the city due to the FA Cup finals being held at the national stadium in Bukit Jalil had delayed many of the guests from coming to the restaurant. No wonder I received sms messages informing me of impending delay in arrival by some guests due to the horrendous traffic congestion. Some even had to abort the journey to the restaurant in frustration mid-way because they had difficulty entering the city.

As we could not wait indefinitely for all the guests to show up we gave the green light to start the dinner at 8.30pm. Thankfully by this time we estimated that more than 95 percent of the seats had been occupied.

The dinner ended at 10.00pm. As a contingency measure I had brought along my cheque book in the event that I was required to issue a checque to the restaurant to cover any short falls in the cash receipts. After tallying all the angpow receipts we were delighted that although the cash that we had collected from the paying guests were insufficient to cover the operating cost of hosting the dinner, the deficit was minimal.
Incurring a total deficit of RM195.80 for hosting a 20 table dinner the figure translates to only a deficit of RM9.79 per table.

We were very happy that after accounting for prepayments to the restaurant the cash receipts were more than enough to settle the restaurant's bill.