A friend put on a conference this week. I hesitated, before asking him, over email, how it was going.
Because I realize that as a conference director, I’ve come to hate that question, myself.
I’ve never suffered gladly or gracefully the routine annoyances of being a conference director. The sweat stain on my conference folder was formed over decades of receiving, in the middle of the conference maw, detailed critiques of the conference format, individual conference sessions, the temperature in the room, the catering options, the name-tag format, the clicking sounds being made by the free pens we gave out. A lot of people are professional consumers. This conference is for professional speechwriters. Next!
But this year, I realized when a rush of blood through my carotid arteries drowned out all conversation, what my greatest gripe is: People, usually old friends of the conference, coming up to me with a well-meaning smile and asking me how I think the conference is going.
Now, what could possibly be the matter with that?
I think of the old joke, where the commander radios down to the sergeant at the beginning of a battle. “Sergeant, in one word, how’s it going?”
“Good!”
“Okay, in two words, how is it going?”
“Not good!”
I mean, hey: My colleagues and I found and rented a fancy venue and stocked it with food and drink. I recruited a couple dozen expert speakers and concocted an attractive program. In haystacks from around the planet earth, I found more than 100 other purposely obscure people who do exactly the strange thing that you do for a living. And here we all are, together, in Washington, D.C., eating turkey sandwiches on brioche bread. Holy fuck! I’d say it’s going pretty well!
Look, I want the pre-conference speakers I recruited and the keynote speaker I cajoled and every speaker after that to hit all the right points, to raise goosebumps, to share practical ideas, to generate healthy and non-rancorous debate, and to generally delight everyone everywhere all at once. I scared the living hell out of a speaker one time, by divulging to her that I go into a conference hoping that no speaker utters a wrong syllable.
But that’s not unrealistic, it’s insane. A conference is a predestined mess—of awkward introductions, strange audience questions, questionable social skills, an occasionally disastrous session if not an occasional wardrobe malfunction. That’s what a conference is. And as the conference unfolds, no one is more aware of “how it’s going” than I—because no one else has spent a whole year imagining what two utterly perfect days would look like, nor worrying about what can and will go wrong.
(See sweat-stained folder, above.)
Once, during a keynote that was bombing like the Eighth Air Force—this was a celebrated speaker who I had seen before and who I had carefully coached for this group and this moment—I walked helplessly into the men’s room, looked in the mirror and asked, “God, do you hate me?” Another speaker missed the mark by so much that I overheard one attendee remark to another in the lunch line: “You know? I think he actually bonded us all together, in shared hatred.”
(See sweat-stained folder, above.)
So if you ask me how I think the conference is going—and every year, some participants do—I’m going to reply: “In one word, or two?”
