God willing, yesterday concludes the final business trip of the year. My rough estimate is 78 days on travel this year. No wonder my suitcase has some wear-marks. The Acela train from Providence to New York is very nice. There is even a “quiet car,” where “library” levels of noise are enforced. Turn off the cell phones, keep your voices low. I loved it.
Discovered a new difficulty level in presentations: When I arrived at the venue, the sponsor asked to see my slides. He proceeded to insist that I delete the first half of them. “Oh, someone else is covering that, you don’t have to.” Infuriating. It was beyond his imagination that I might want to, for example, light people’s minds up to some topics by using the same words several times through a talk, but in slightly different contexts … or that there might be some benefit to lining up with what earlier speakers had said, in order to reinforce or build on an idea. I tend to see my presentations as a story, not an isolated series of bullet points … and removing the first half of my story made it a little tricky to justify the second half. No no, I just didn’t get it and I needed to relax.
Just as I got my head around that bit, someone else tried to convince me that it would be bad form to use my (Apple) laptop to present, since one of the partners at this particular event was Dell. That just didn’t happen. One random, unexpected, unnecessary and irritating change per customer.
As usual, it went okay once I got hold of the microphone. Sheesh.
On the other hand, they put me up at a sweet little boutique hotel in Manhattan, and I got to see several old friends for dinner. Sometimes, you just gotta roll with it.
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