Conferences

Being a keynote speaker at a conference is very stressful. You would think that the more you do it the easier it becomes, but it isn’t like that apparently. The more you do, the better you get, and the more you get asked to give weightier and longer presentations to larger and larger groups of people. What my friends and relatives in the music industry refer to as “high pressure gigs”. I can imagine what Barrack Obama feels like. There again, he doesn’t have to use slides and he has someone to write his speeches. I arrived here 5 days ago. I have attended a few sessions, had meals with one or two people, done a few visits to local institutions, but most of the time I have been closeted in my room on the 8th floor going over and over and over and revising and re-revising this presentation – over and over and over. Rehearsing, making sure it fits the allotted time, correcting spelling errors, checking facts with colleagues – it never ends. This morning I was up at six and at it again. I missed meals. I missed exercising. I missed life, all for this blasted presentation. By lunchtime I was trembling, sweating, felt my stomach churning. Dry mouth, slight tremor, slight nausea. It felt like final exams all over again. The speaker before me was an elderly gent from Brazil whose first language was Portuguese. He was struggling a little with the English presentation and more than a little with the English questions. He seemed to go on for ever. Eventually my turn came. I put my jacket on (why? the temperature here is in the 30’s! Don’t want to offend anyone though). Fortunately I remembered to take a glass of water to the podium – at least I have learned that.

I have a theory that no matter how many times you go through your presentation beforehand, there is always one slide which when it comes up causes you to think “Now where the hell did that come from? Did I write that??” Today it didn’t happen. Maybe I was better prepared. It usually happens when I use other people’s slides – like my boss’s. If you write your own you are more likely to remember why you said whatever is written there.

I dread the question time more than the actual presentation. You always get some bright sparks who feel aggrieved at not having been invited to speak themselves, and take their ire out on you by asking completely obscure questions, totally off the point and utterly unanswerable. I got one of those today. I have learnt that one can either side-step them, deflect them to someone else in the audience (did that twice this afternoon) or play a straight bat and bounce them back to the person who asked them. I suspect teachers use much the same techniques with teenage pupils.
I am not convinced that the use of multimedia has done anything useful for the standard of public speaking. I do it because everyone else does it, but the best addresses I have heard have in fact been delivered either with no visuals at all or with a bare minimum – I remember a talk at a conference some years ago by a professor of history, on the Influenza Epidemic of 1916 or whenever it was. He had one overhead flimsy, which basically gave the headings of his talk, and for the rest he spoke from notes. But he spoke beautifully, enunciated every word, emphasized what needed to be emphasized – it was like poetry. He might have been talking complete twoffle and I would not have minded.

I am also not convinced that these conferences themselves serve any useful purpose at all, apart from providing an opportunity to meet people – other players in the field, experts and authorities, like minded individuals. If, like me, you prefer not to meet such people, then there is little point in going to conferences. Registration for this one was free, being sponsored by the organizers, but I have paid anything from $50 to $1000 to attend a conference in the past. And that is just to get in. Add $200/night for accommodation and food, about $2000 for flights if it is international, $1000 if it is national, and a whole bunch of sundries like visa charges, travel insurance and the like and you are talking about $4000 before you are through. Then there is the time away from the office and all the work that needs to be caught up on later. There’s time away from home and the extra stress on one’s better half and kids. All this to give a 30 minute talk which half the delegates bunk and the other half fall asleep in. Someone must be laughing at us all, and I suspect it is the tourism industry. What a crazy idea. Anyway, the budget brakes are on for next year so I expect I shall be doing a lot less of this sort of thing for a while. I am not sure that I shall miss it.

The other downside of these trips is the toll they take on your diet and exercise schedule. It usually ends up that the costs of some meals are covered and of others not, so one ends up not eating when one should, and eating far too much when one should restrain oneself. I generally don’t sleep too well in hotels. I have a habit of leaving the TV on and falling asleep at right angles on the bed (so that I can watch) and then waking up at some small hour with some really awful movie (they keep the C grade stuff till after midnight) blaring at me – usually about chain saw massacres or kinky holidays in Xanadu or really lame “dorks day out” type of slapstick comedy. I hate it, but often don’t have the energy to get up and switch it off, the remote having slipped from the bed when I fell asleep and disappeared from view. So, being short of sleep, I have less desire to exercise and being short of exercise I have less desire to sleep – it really is a vicious cycle.

On the upside I have gotten to visit some pretty remarkable places. Just this year I have, let me see, been to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Mali, Czechoslovakia and The Netherlands. I passed up opportunities to visit Mexico, the USA, China, India, Cambodia and Burkina Faso. Next year I am supposed to go to Germany (Berlin) and Estonia. Not sure where else. A jetliner of the size which can fly me to Nairobi carries, I believe about 100 000 litres of fuel. The big ones that fly to the USA carry nearly double that. I don’t know whether they use most of it – presumably not – but even if they use half of what they carry, we are burning up a huge amount of fossil fuel with all this conferencing – is it really worth it? Shouldn’t we be leading the way and making a ruling about rather doing all this stuff by telecom or videocon. Of course the hotels would not be happy. But neither will they be happy when the climate changes to the degree that no one can visit them anyway.

That’s my take on conferences. OK up to a point. If one has to cut back, they can go. Been there, done that. Wanna go home.