Worst. Conference. Ever.
Nice conference venue, surroundings were nice and the food was okay. Terrible speaker, though.
Maybe I’m a traditionalist, having been in the office game for a few decades, but I miss the old days when you could go to one of Victoria’s conference venues and actually learn something. This one had too much meditating, writing down your goals on a piece of paper and talking. We did SO much talking, to the person next to us, to somehow we hadn’t yet met, to a person who had the same birthday as us (and trust me, just because Jan and I were both born on August 19th does NOT mean we’re fast friends).
What’s wrong with a good trust fall? It’s a flawless way to tell which of your co-workers are good people, and which of them would stab you in the back to get to the last bit of coffee in the percolator. You think I’m joking, but for you, I have two words: Sally Edgerton. My second job working for the electronics firm. This was back in the day when companies sending off their employees to a conference centre was still a bit hip and edgy instead of standard practice. Sally came along, and grumbled the entire way because she sat at the desk, answered phone calls and didn’t have anything to do with the rest of us. You’d think it was because her job didn’t involve much teamwork, but she was just generally a cantankerous old bat.
Anyway, when it came to the trust falls, she jumped back at the last moment because she thought she’d mess up her nails. And one morning, she actually thrust out her foot and tripped me so I wouldn’t make it to the coffee jug, then used to confusion to steal some for herself.
Co-workers can be terrifying, which is why you need hard and straight methods of sussing out the bad eggs instead of…whatever that was.
At least we got those days off. Got myself a swanky Great Ocean Road hotel, had myself a good time. So at least I came back to work refreshed.
-Clive