On Wednesday I went to a work-related seminar. These things tend to be fairly standard. You book in advance when it all seems like a good idea. When the email drops into your mail box you think, “Yes I’ll go to that, keep up to date with the industry, do some networking . . . . ‘ But when the day arrives and you have to make your way into town after a full day at work, you curse at making the booking in the first place and particularly for following it up when no-one emailed to confirm.

At the start of the event, after filling in a European funding form and pinning on a name badge, you kind of hang around a little, feeling awkward. A number of faces will be familiar. First up are the hosts and the sponsors. The sponsors will have a pop-up stand and team of people handing out flyers. Then there are other small business owners, staff from the universities, a few students and some techies. You can tell the techies apart from the students as they wear t-shirts with RSS logos and slogans that you don’t quite understand. And lastly there are the ‘professional networkers’. These people will go to the opening of a can of beans if there’s the promise of a free glass of wine. Then you’re called in to sit down.

There’s always a ‘warm-up guy’ who begins by going through the ‘house keeping’ as it now seems to be called. How to find the toilet and how to get out if the building catches on fire. An hour later you secretly start to wish for the latter scenario. Then the speakers are introduced and it begins.

Of course these things always start late and then tend to overrun and just when you think it’s nearly over they invite questions. This sends a secret message to every dufus in the room who loves the sound of his / her own voice to suddenly pipe up. So you sit there another 10 minutes, shuffling to stop your bum going numb on the plastic chairs. And finally – it’s finished. Everyone congregates in the adjoining room to drink a plastic cup full of tepid wine. And all that remains is to judge how long you can leave it before making a dash for the exit without seeming impolite.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Being your own boss, Me, Out of Levy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.