Nothing (much) To Report

The next time anyone even utters the word "conference" to me I'm going to run very quickly in the other direction…

I've only just started to recover from a conference our weird community charity put on last month, in Cardiff incidently. Lovely, smashing hotel. Fantastic king size beds and crisp white linen (really makes you want to get up to all sorts of things in it…but I digress) It was the Future Inn at Cardiff Bay, incase you were wondering. Highly recommended…just as long as you aren't planning to spend 2 days running around like a headless chicken there. Which is exactly how I spent my time.

 We'd known we were putting on a conference for the last 6 months, but somewhere along the line everyone just assumed everyone else was doing something about it. We have a "Training and Events Co-ordinator" based at our HQ, I call her Mrs Posh (not to her face of course) becuase she has a splendid plummy accent and says gosh alot and it's really great to hear her swear. Any how, I guess we all thought it would kinda sort itself out…but I was wrong!

 Hind sight is a wonderful thing. Now, I am the entire IT department where I work so anything even remotely technical falls to me. Doesn't matter if it's running an AV desk, setting up mics etc - it's so *obviously* my job. FFS!

So the cheap-skatey people we are at our weird community charity, only pays for 1/2 a day of "technical expertise" - the rest of the day is up to me. In reality I get 30 seconds of how to work the mics and where the dvd player is. Woo. Of course when it's my turn to be in charge, the mics decide to have a benny and refuse to work whilst both of them are on and I can't get to the other end of the stoopid L-shaped conference room to tell the other woman to turn it off. And then the big un-veiling of the smashing dvd goes pear-shaped rather spectacularly. When I take it out of the stuttering dvd player afterwards, all becomes clear: it looks like the "technical expert" ate a doughnut on top of it and had a wank. With all the greasy little prints on it, I'm surprised it ever managed to play at all.

 Anyway - so all that is my fault as well…and we end day one of the conference in a crisis meeting instead of having a shower and changing for the evening meal. Nice. It got better though, they had a special offer on the vodka in the hotel so I proceeded to get absolutley smashed…and decide to take myself off to bed about 2/3ish before I really show myself up (like in many previous job outings/piss ups - yay!)

Day two arrived rather too early for me and I have to have a very long shower to try and wake myself up enough to be able to face breakfast. I just about managed to hobble through that, check the spare dvd for the day and take quite a few paracetamols to get rid of the minging hangover I now have. The churning feeling in my stomach doesn't get any better though as I have to launch my new software at the conference in a workshop full of people who are also nursing hangovers and would rather be in bed. I was rescued by my mate Dan, who I made go through the software instead of myself (to show that anyone can use it…not that I can't stand up at this point, honest) and I scraped through the presentation and even got a round of applause! Woo to me. The rest of the day past without incident as I found myself a dark corner to lurk in until the final end of conference meeting where we had to have a group hug. Community hippy types, eh?

By moosh