Don't Do These at a Conference, Please

(A Top Ten List)

By Holly B. Smith
Cluster Specialist
Business Management Administration, Finance, Marketing

10.  Don’t park your vehicle in two parking spaces.  You’ve just made another person, or even a car full of persons, have to spend 30 minutes driving around for parking, paying more for parking, and generally and unnecessarily starting their conference day on a bad note.

9.   Don’t spill your coffee in the buffet line and make absolutely no attempt to acknowledge it. Even worse, don’t loudly yell, “They don’t pay me to clean up around here,” and prance off. What was going to be a handful of sympathetic, “I’ve been there” smiles is now a collective eye roll as we all think, “Heaven help the students who get that teacher.”

8.   Don’t grab the last roll in the lunch line, with your bare hands, and then turn to me and ask if I want it.  I just saw you “Achoo!” into your hands.  I am wearing my big girl pants; I can wait for the next batch to come out.  I don’t need your sneezer.

7.   Don’t be the one who disrupts a presentation with a ringing phone (playing your favorite 80s tune) and then fumbles for a solid 3 minutes looking for it, and then cannot remember how to turn it off, and THEN announces to the group how you cannot remember to turn it off.  I think you’re pretty much done for this breakout session.  You may leave.

6.   Don’t be the one person sitting alone at a lunch table that seats 10.  You just saw me and said something to me after the last presentation.  We had a friendly exchange.  Surely you can stomach sharing one of your 9 extra chairs with me for a 20 minute bowl of soup.

5.   Don’t complain about the temperature.  It’s a conference.  It’s going to be cold.  Unreasonably………uncharacteristically……….ungodly cold.  We all know this.  Bring your lightweight jacket and don’t wear open-toed shoes.  And, go easy on the comments about it being as cold as a meat locker, or cold enough to hang meat.  We get it.

4.   Don’t go over time on your presentation.  This is normally a sign that you didn’t practice enough and you are ad-libbing.  Trust me, when its 3 minutes before your time is up, we start gathering our belongings.  The second your time is up, you are dead to us.

3.   If you plan on using the internet during your presentation, use it sparingly.  Those 5-7 seconds it takes to get to the next site (on your list of 20 sites that you just HAVE to show us) will kill our focus.

2.   Don’t do a presentation on the cool thing that won’t be available for two more years.  If it’s not ready for two more years, maybe this wasn’t the conference for you.

1.   Don’t use someone else’s presentation as a platform to explore your personal agenda.  Don’t ask the presenter tricky questions in the hopes of sparking a debate that leads you to spouting off a well-rehearsed paragraph aimed at ultimately revealing your utter genius.  I guarantee you, that awkward exchange is all we’ll be talking about as we leave the presentation….while fumbling for our cell phones, spilling our coffee, and pulling our sweaters tighter around us.