Conferences are an interesting combination of heaven and hell. The heaven aspect is that you don’t need to do any real work for a few days and the hell is that the interest factor is infinitely variable. Sitting for hours in a buttock numbing seat at a recent conference, nursing the hangover from last nights cocktail reception and dribbling coffee down my industry uniform, I became utterly despondent and decided to actually read the conference program. These documents are masterpieces of invention containing a wealth of information of relevance to virtually no-one other than the authors. The one bit that you really want to see, the agenda, is usually buried in the center somewhere on two pages, which I swear have been deliberately stuck together by the evil printers.
After a bit of careful browsing I found the biographies section. Oh Joy! Oh happiness! Biographies are great. First they are cleverly written in the third person so it looks independent and unbiased. Like yeah! Sure! we believe that. But mainly it gives us a chance to see just how silly the company or employee is, by examining the lies and silly job titles. The silly job title fashion started with “Evangelist” (slightly silly) and has now grown into such atrocities as “Visionmaster” (silly and misleading, a very good optician perhaps?) or my recent favorite “Exception Handler” (extremely silly, perpetrator should be shot on sight). But don’t ignore this silliness because it offers a valuable early warning system about companies you might have occasion to deal with. Or not as the case may be.
A case in point. Next time you walk into the lobby of a company and the receptionist hands you their business card, you have definite cause for concern. If it proffers a job title of “Auditory Telecommunications Placement Specialist”, run away. Do not past Go, do not collect your $200. Run away and never have anything to do with the company again. Don’t even admit you’ve been there, even to close friends. Any association with this company is destined for financial ruin, death or even worse, hair loss. Why is this so? You may ask.
Well, investors have probably made the fatal mistake of allowing geeks to have their own company and compounded the error by repeatedly giving them large quantities of money. They do this because they are generally greedy and technologically naive. They don’t understand what the hell the geeks are talking about and as a consequence feel inferior. They don’t like this feeling so they invest because they think it makes them look clever. Geeks of course are oblivious to this process and think this commercial endorsement somehow reflects their company running ability.
Of course it usually goes horribly wrong because Playing Dungeons and Dragons and sitting in a darkened room full of computers all day and night, might be good for technical and creative skills (well it might be, you never know!), but it has the opposite effect on “reality awareness” skills. If you are dealing with one of these companies and even a sniff of “virtual reality abuse” (VRA) looks evident, the alarm bells should begin to clang so strongly that you’ll be vibrated out of the building. Quoting a dear friend of mine “Most people have enough trouble dealing with real reality, let alone the virtual sort”.
Anyway after this little inward reflection I returned my focus to the podium to see what the latest act was. I’m pleasantly amused as they have just wheeled on a 300 pound “Fortune Telling Walrus” or “visionary analyst” as they are sometimes called. You may ask why I use this term? Well, they are usually rather large, due to bloating of ego and too many free lunches, there’s an obligatory mustache (worn by people who have something to hide - and walruses of course) and they are usually less credible than the Psychic Network. This particular, self appointed industry spokespersons speciality seemed to be a sandwich of “the moronically obvious” filled with “unlikely” spread, “acronym” ham and “buzzword” cheese. He had unusually and carelessly broken the Walrus’ golden rule - he ceased to be vague. The vaguer you are the more option you have to say “I told you so” later on and fill in the details you never gave. Strangely this does not seem to bother the rest of the audience, who it seems are enthusiastically resigned to a world filled with Charlatans and provocateurs.
Anyway the accuracy and visionary content of the talk is roughly analogous to the following, “Next week (if it arrives) will possibly have days with approximately 25 hours in them and a day called Monday might possibly follow a day called Tuesgurgle”. The Walrus is then wheeled off like Hannibal Lecter to rapturous applause and the throwing of fish (compliments).
Next up - the obligatory and very welcome “Mad Person” is unchained to entertain us for the next 45 minutes.
The mad person is usually introduced as “Hieronymous F. Locustberg, inventor and pioneer of the eclectic Renfrewshidian Looping Technology” or “Tarquin Szbzweniaczi-Smith, discoverer of the Exacerbated Garramond Paradox and widely acclaimed illustrator of immanentized neo-profusile Bulgarian Logic.
No-one knows what any of this means, but it’s OK because the mad person wears an aqualung, go-go boots, a cape and has a radio antennae strapped to his forehead. He is crackling with flashes of static electric lightning and he looks like he’s just dropped acid for the third time this morning. You know the wonders of the universe are about to be revealed to you.
The mad person is the luckiest person in the universe because his job it is to be creative and deeply intangible but not to necessarily produce anything real. He lives in a think tank, but I don’t think it has any guns or anything and executives meekly feed huge quantities of cash in, presumably through the turret. He is the concept persons, concept person and he is totally amazing. Conferences should contain as many of these people as possible. They usually start with the most tenuous of ideas, like “intestinal satellite dishes” or “remote controlled hamster bathing apparatus” and end up with a concept that is stunning in it’s simplicity and set to revolutionize society as we know it. I don’t even know what this guy talked about, but I remember my jaw dangling in awe as the “highly improbable” became “the answer to life as we know it”.
Finally the day finished with the dreaded “commercially motivated” keynote speaker. This is a keynote speech with a difference. The difference is that it is usually a poorly disguised infomercial for the speakers company/product. It is also thoroughly boring to a majority of the audience who are still reeling from the mad persons universe expansion. It’s also mainly because the marketing person spends half an hour pitching the improbable capabilities of the product (cure for cancer, world peace etc.) and has also insisted on bringing a socially inept engineer in to provide a live product demo which lasts for 3 hours longer than the scheduled 10 minute slot. The engineer talks like he has had a recent lobotomy with “complications” requiring removal of all of his “confidence glands”. He sweats uncontrollably and leaves about a 5 minute gap between each hastily muttered phrase because the demo device is a prototype and keeps catching fire and electrocuting him. Finally the marketing person breaks down and runs weeping to the stage to gloss over the inadequacies and the audience sighs relief and ceases to contemplate mass suicide. The engineer, unperturbed, asks if there are any questions. The room tenses, praying (sometimes out loud), that there aren’t. Their prayers are cruelly ignored as the only interested person in an audience of 500 people stands up and asks a question of such hideous complexity that it isn’t really a question at all but a statement inviting a further hour of dribbling speculation and juxtaposed rhetoric. The braver ones dive for the exit, but the more timid and polite realize their fate is sealed and slowly reach for the cyanide pills…..
I was one of the lucky few.
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