Show morning

What this is for

It is 6am. The crew is landing, driving in, or already eating hotel
breakfast. In the old routine you open four things — the rooming
spreadsheet to see who is actually in the hotel, the flight tracker to
see who is still in the air, the group text to see who answered
“landed”, and the run of show — and then you walk the lobby counting
heads.

Every one of those facts is already in Herding Cats. It was just in
five different tabs. Show morning is the join. One screen, built for
the phone in your hand, answering one question:

Is everyone who needs to be here, here?

Anything that is fine collapses to a single line. Anything that is not
opens up with what you need to know and the one thing that fixes it —
usually a phone call.

Getting to it

Open the event. In the At a glance strip at the top of the
Overview:

• On a day the event is running, Show morning is the first
  tile, reading something like 14 of 16 here with a green, amber or
  red dot. Tap it.
• On any other day it sits at the end of the strip, quiet, reading
  Opens on event days. It still works — tap it any time you want to
  see how the arrival picture is shaping up.

The address is /events/<year>/<event>/morning if you’d rather bookmark
it.

What the screen says

Across the top: the date, a clock, and the chip you came for —
14 of 16 here. That chip stays stuck to the top as you scroll, so
you can read it, walk ten feet, and read it again.

Then three sections, in the order you actually worry about them.

1. Crew

One row per person on this event’s roster — everyone staffed on it
who hasn’t been taken off — the same people an event update would
reach. Each row is a face, a
name, a position, and where they are:

A green row is one line and nothing else. An amber or red row opens
underneath with the details and the buttons: Call, Text,
Something changed? (which opens the disruption planner), Position,
and Rooming when the problem is a missing bed.

How the colours are decided. Green is “here”, or on track to be.
Amber is on track but tight — landing inside 90 minutes of the staff
brief, or with no room on the list. Red is trouble, no travel booked,
or — the important one — the staff brief has started and this person
has not checked in at the venue. Once the brief time passes, the
screen stops being optimistic.

2. The building

Load-in, the staff brief, doors, and load-out — read straight off the
event worksheet, with a live countdown beside each: Brief in 42 min,
Load-in 1h 48m ago. If you typed a note into a worksheet row
(“Dock opens at 5, ring the bell”), your words show instead of the
clock time.

Underneath: the venue’s name and address, the on-site contact, and the
venue’s front desk — each one tap to dial. If your venue directory
carries a standing note about this building, it appears here as a
warning, because 6am is exactly when the dock gate is locked until
6:30 matters.

Anything nobody has set reads Not set — add it and links back to
the worksheet.

3. The room

The rooming list, reduced to whether it is going to cause you a problem
this morning:

• 16 roomed, all confirmed — nothing to do.
• 3 people have no room — named, with a link straight to the
  rooming board.
• N without a confirmation number — the rooms your people are in
  that you never got a number back for.

Only people who actually need a bed are counted: someone who flew in,
or whose home is more than 50 miles from the venue. A local crew member
is never flagged for not having a hotel room.

It updates itself

Leave the page open. When someone taps I’m at the venue on their
phone, their row goes green on its own within a minute — no reload, no
refresh button. Roster and worksheet changes appear straight away. If
you switch to another tab and come back, it catches up immediately
rather than showing you stale news.

Honest limits

• There is no live flight tracking yet. Flight times on this screen
  are the times you booked. A real delay is invisible to Herding Cats
  until someone tells it — which is why Something changed? sits on
  every row. What we can see is a booking you’ve marked Conflict
  and a live National Weather Service alert at one of the airports on
  the trip; both show as Flight trouble.
• “At the hotel” is an inference, not a check-in. The app’s
  check-in buttons are I’ve landed and I’m at the venue — there is
  no hotel button. Someone who landed yesterday and has a room is
  shown as at the hotel because that is where they almost certainly
  are, not because they said so.
• Times are the venue’s local time. Herding Cats stores your event
  times as the clock on the venue’s wall and shows them back unchanged.
  The clock in the header is your own device’s. If you are reading this
  screen from a different timezone than the event, the countdowns will
  be off by the difference.
• It reads the roster as staffed. Everyone on the event’s staffing
  tab appears here; someone you swapped off or removed does not. This
  screen is the people you would text.

Where to go next

• Staff an event — getting people
  onto the roster this screen reads
• Hotels and rooming — the rooming
  board behind the third section
• Flights — the flight records behind the
  arrival times
• When plans change — what
  Something changed? opens
• Show Day — building the program the day actually runs on