Written yesterday at hotel with crappy internet

Aargh I’m in silly conference hotel which has wifi but it isn’t working. Since I’ve been stressing about this since 4am I reckon I should just write it to get out of my system.

This is a conference for the younger members (it’s all relative) in a particular subset of a subset of my employer’s area. The people are nice (this is just a piss up excuse for them really) and most of them have met me before. Basically I totally cocked up my talk yesterday. I can talk to students til the cows come home. OK I sometimes have bad days but yesterday sucked.

I normally get to talk for at least half an hour but yesterday I was only allowed 15min and as usual I was the last person before the bar opened and they’d been sat already being presented to death. I freaked out, burbled and didn’t have nearly enough time to say what I needed (I get jumpy when people glare at me). Most of these guys work in industry in an area which I despise so it’s hard to get into their mindset (students etc are easy). They’re mostly heavily involved in this sub/subset and don’t seem interested in the rest of the organisation which is shit because they could get so much more out of it if they did.

Really I’m just pissed cos I came across badly by giving a shit talk. I know it sounds silly but giving talks is what I do now and I’m usually really good at it.

After about 3 hours of stressing this morning (4-7) I realised that I’m just going to have to speak to as many people as possible today and to email the ones that I think I need to.

My talk did generate a bit of interest and response so I’ll take that back and pretend that I didn’t screw up.

I avoided the “disco” last night – live band which was loud enough to make your ears bleed so at least I got more sleep than the rest who I think I heard coming into the hotel about 4am.