Event Planning 101

 

The big day has finally come. The event you have been planning for the last week is coming to fruition. It's 7:45 a.m., you begin connecting your equipment to the auditorium network connection when you realize that the overhead projector hasn't been turned on yet--and you can't get in the locked door to turn it on. Sweat begins to bead up on your forehead. After fumbling around and dropping your PDA, you eventually manage to get someone to turn on the projector. What else could go wrong? What else indeed.

Next you realize that you are missing the dongle that connects your Ethernet card to the network. Two minutes and counting, the help desk bails you out with a spare dongle and the PC is up and running. You almost have time to breathe a sigh of relief when you realize the presenter you scheduled is late.

As the audience begins to trickle in you try to bring up the presentation the presenter provided, and you discover it requires a software product you don't have on the computer. To kill time you decide to introduce the now-present presenter while he disconnects your machine and connects his own. That is when you realize you don't know a darn thing about this person except for the company he works for. Not to worry, hardly anyone came to the presentation anyway. Why is that? Oh, the marketing posters never got put up and the e-mail you sent to managers never got forwarded to …

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