Crazy Workshop – Tuesday 14 Nov 2006

Well I’ve finally experienced a workshop worse than the Deployment workshop in Canberra.

For those of you who suffered through the trials of the deployment workshops at Erindale you will know I was scared by the one in December – a whole day of being yelled at will do that to a girl :)

Up until today I thought that was as rude as people could get to presenters… now I know better.

Today Chris and I attended a presentation put on by one of the partners to our client. It was suppose to be a 5 hour workshop presenting to the people who will benefit from our project. A little bit of propaganda, but still interesting for the participants.

They invited 230 people and 485 turned up… as you can expect this had a serious impact on the set up of the room. Primarily there weren’t enough chairs for all participants. So these 485 people walk into the room, not quite half of them get seats and then the rest are quite distressed…So distressed in fact that when the presenter is trying to tell them that she’s asked for more chairs to be brought up and asking if she can begin the welcome, one of them came up, took the microphone and said that on behalf of all the headmasters here that they were crabby they still didn’t have seats.

Of course we couldn’t understand what any of them were saying coz they were speaking Arabic - one of the girls from our team did some rapid translation so we could follow along.

So the first 4 presenters all start by apologising for the seats (or more precisely the lack there of). Admittedly it took ages for the chairs to be brought up by the reception centre but these people just wouldn’t get over it.

The whole event hadn’t got off to the most auspicious start and by lunchtime we were running nearly 45 minutes late. One of the CISCO presenters was up doing her little piece of propaganda and this guy yelled out that she was suppose to only go for 45 minutes, that 45 minutes was up and that she should finish.

I was appalled. She still had about 10 slides to go. If I had been presenting I’d have been mortified. There was nearly 500 people in the room and she got totally roasted by this guy.

I asked the girl who was translating for us if this was normal behaviour and she said no. She said it was very rude and that it would not normally happen. But the whole day was like that, people talking over presenters (really loudly) and generally just being rude bastards. At lunch time people were taking whole trays of sandwiches and going into corners to eat them all… trays that were suppose to be shared between everyone!

Anyways – this experience hasn’t scared me (coz I wasn’t the one being yelled at!) but it has shown me that it doesn’t mater what country you’re in, people can still be rude bastards!