RealMarshall

Pre conference:

• Pay conference organizer a significant amount of money
• Receive daily spam from conference organizer daily for 90 days leading up to the event
• Receive volumes of spam and spurious phone calls from vendors ‘really wanting to meet you’ and realise the conference organiser has provided all your details to all the exhibitors.
• As the departure day approaches realise you actually probably don’t need to spend three days looking at various ethernet switches and you probably have a lot more important things to do, but it’s too late to get a refund now. Even worse you realise there are some people going (possibly even from your own organisation) that you don’t relish spending three days locked up in a hotel or conference center with.

The conference:

1. Get up at 5am, queue 2 hours for security screening, plane delayed, try unsuccessfully to get a wifi signal to do email for an hour.
2. Sit on plane while pushed back and out of touch as we missed our takeoff slot.
3. Fly 2-6 hours depending on venue.
4. Register at venue. Put on your mandatory name tag labelling you as vendor prey for the duration.
5. Register at awful hotel (if you’re lucky and they have a room/haven’t lost your registration)
6. Attend exhibit hall. Look at ethernet switches until your brain is numb
7. Look at something that looks like it’s something other than an ethernet switch but find out it is after all, just an ethernet switch but a different shape.
8. Have people take your business card every 5 paces. Your incoming spam email velocity increases 20% per hour. Your blackberry is behaving like an angry wasp.
9. To alleviate the boredom, look at a router
10. Pretend to be on the phone to prevent sales attacks
11. Repeat steps 6-10 until you can’t carry any more literature or the venue closes. Mercifully your blackberry battery has run out by now.
12. Attend conference. After the keynote speech realise all other presentations are thinly veiled sales pitches for ethernet switches or routers (see 7 & 9 above) 
13. Unless you like being shouted at, befriended, etc by inebriated ethernet switch purchasers, stay away from post conference parties or events that involve ethernet switch manufacturers providing free alchohol
14. Repeat steps 6-13 for the duration of the conference, then do 1-3 again on the way home.

Post conference:

•  Recycle all conference material
• Tighten up your spam blacklist
• Change your phone number
• Vow never to do it again
• Pick up a piece of spam from the massive stack on your desk and as you go to throw it away realise it’s for a rather interesting conference on wireless access points .. well.. it is three months away, I can always change my mind … .

END DO;

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