The conference I attended was good. I mean, you can't really go wrong with a trip to SoCal on the company dime, but aside from that, I learned a lot of general things, and a few things I can apply to my everyday work. This was my first corporate conference, and it was interesting to see the difference between it and an academic conference. As you might expect, the corporate conference is much better funded. There is much more free food, well, maybe free is the wrong word since the attendees pay a steep registration fee (usually covered by the attendees' employers), but nearly every meal is catered and there are snacks between sessions as well. Although, I wonder if the organizers got confused about the average age of the attendees (probably late 40s), as they were pushing sugar on us like we were a group of 13-year-old kids who were away from their parents for the weekend. Breakfast was donuts or some other pastry, between-session snack was ice cream bars, and the only available soft drink was soda. Would it be so hard to put out some granola and yogurt, a veggie platter, and some sparkling water?
[The hotel I stayed at in Palm Springs. I brought my swimsuit, but never went into the pool. What a waste.]Another thing I noticed is that there was an emphasis placed on making the conference "cool". Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen pumped through the sound system before the plenary talks, beer and wine were made available at the end of each day's sessions, everybody dressed casually (some in shorts, Tevas, and ball caps), there was a dodgeball tournament ("live by the ball, die by the ball" the apparent motto), and you could just tell the organizers were trying to create a laid-back, "we're hip" feel. The keynote speaker epitomized this. He gave a reasonably informative and interesting talk, and I think the audience mostly liked him, but his style seem contrived and bombastic and really annoyed me. The Onion once ran a really funny article titled "I'm Quite Eccentric Within Accepted Societal Norms", and I kept thinking about this when watching the keynote speaker.
In general, I'm not sure how I feel about work being "cool". It depends on how cynical a mood I'm in. On the one hand, being cool is better than being boring and depressing. On the other hand, it's a bit phoney. It misrepresents the employer-employee relationship as something akin to a friendship, which it isn't. Unless you work for yourself, no matter how much you're paid, you're still essentially just a toil. If you aren't in some way making money for somebody at the top, I doubt work will be too cool for you regardless of whether or not your office has a Nintendo Wii. Anyway, I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. It's just a thing, is all. It is what it is, as the saying (which I've never really liked) goes.
[San Diego is a weird city in that the airport is right on the bay near the downtown area.]On a different topic, I got to see my uncle T and two cousins, A and Ca, while in San Diego (the conference was in Palm Springs, but I went to San Diego for a few days to work from a colleague's home office). It was really nice. We all went to dinner Thursday night along with A's girlfriend and her cousin who also happened to be in from out of town. Toward the end of the night Ca's friend (girlfriend?) also showed up. We had a leisurely dinner that ended around 10:30, and then some others went out to enjoy the San Diego nightlife. I went back to the hotel as I was already dragging (east coast time) and had to wake up relatively early the next day (and be on point) for a meeting with coworkers.
Apparently I missed out as when I saw A the next evening, he told me that, through some strange confluence of events, he, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's cousin were invited by a Pro Bowl football player to hangout with him in the VIP section at some club. A said the guy was really cool and kept buying them drinks. As one might expect, A also said he then spent most the afternoon trying to sleep off a hangover. This shows how old and lame I'm getting as my first thought wasn't, "Damn, I missed a chance to hang out with an NFLer", it was, "Whew, good thing I went back to the hotel or I'd be hung over and miserable today, too". Yep, still crazy after all these years.
Alright, time to wrap it up so that I can go for a run before dinner. Gotta work off all those extra calories I ingested throughout the conference. Until next time...
No comments:
Post a Comment