2 December 2015, 10 am
The Congress Steering Committee is holding its monthly meeting. Today we have some figures for the Financials. The Financials show that this year’s Congress only just broke even, or perhaps that it made a small loss: it depends a bit how you look at the spreadsheet. Also we spent £76.58 on balloons, and £45.13 getting Mr Davies out of the lift that morning they shut him in there (and wasn’t THAT worthwhile??). My job at the meeting is to ask difficult questions. For example: why do we bother? It seems to me that a lot of people bust a lot of guts to make the event happen (and gut-busting on this scale is a messy business, believe me) and yet still we only just break even. And this is maybe because there are not enough delegates there, so that in the networking breaks everyone has to network with the same people several times over, which is also a messy business and confusing to boot. Then I ask another difficult question: how about doing a one-day conference instead? This would have all sorts of benefits, chief among them that we would not need to go back to last year’s conference hotel with the non-compliant lifts. And then we think: perhaps we will have shorter networking sessions, because after all networking is a bit of a waste of time compared to proper serious CPD. And maybe we could have fewer panel discussions, because a panel discussion sometimes becomes an excuse for speakers not to prepare anything useful beforehand and just roll up for a chat, which again doesn’t compare well to proper serious CPD. Perhaps we will just do a single, full-on day of proper serious CPD sessions and Powerpoint® slides. During these deeply constructive discussions, the telephone – which is less a communications system than a random-thought-generating machine – assists by bringing us all manner of unwanted noises such as of people chewing, typing, answering the doorbell and shouting at their domestic staff, but appears incapable of transmitting good quality sound from CIPA Hall back to the people dialling in from Afar. It lobs in, on their behalf, random, disembodied contributions at random, unconnected moments, on topics we have either long finished discussing or never intended to discuss. These curve-balls are greeted with puzzled glances and shrugs, followed by ill-disguised attempts to bash the square pegs of randomness into the round holes of the agenda. It does not help the meeting progress smoothly. In the end, we come up with a Cunning Plan. The Cunning Plan is to hold another meeting to discuss the heretical thoughts in more detail. It will be a teleconference. Hmm. Great idea. Still, by CIPA standards, this is proper serious Progress.
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