Inspiring from within

No joke. That was the name of the conference I had the pleasure (?) to attend all day Friday (February 27th).

Inspiring From Within
"Ready, Set, Grow!"

I did not pay for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Someone else in my office was supposed to go and when a deadline forced her to remain at the office, I was the lucky duck selected to attend in her place. Before I proceed to rip to shreds every last conference-y minute, allow me to first note that a day out of the office is a day worth celebrating regardless, and having emerged with a pot of mint, a bag full of goodies and my own artistic creation (see photo below for the prettiest art of all the art), as well as a tummy full of free catered food, I really have nothing to complain about.


Of course, if I actually had nothing to complain about, then I wouldn't be able to blog about it and you would have nothing to read.
So, hurray for you. And me.

I was a little late getting downtown to the hotel at which the conference was being held. You see, I refused to leave any earlier than I would have left for work so it put my arrival time about 10 minutes before the opening remarks, when, according to the program, it should have been 40-50 minutes before that. When I finally arrived and registered, picked up some coffee and breakfast and entered the main ballroom, most people were already seated. Most had already consumed their free breakfasts (muffins, muesli, pretentious-looking fruit/vegetable drinks, COFFEE). Most evidently judged my almost-tardiness. (Most were approximately 20-30 years my senior.)

As the conference officially commenced, it didn't take me long to make the most significant observance I would make of the entire day: middle-aged working women are incredibly rude.

Whoa! How dare I indulge in such a generalization! (Especially since I will go on to criticize equivalent generalizations made throughout the event.) Well, given my age (24 years) and background (this is my first year working full-time, having formerly been in pre-, elementary, high, undergraduate and graduate school with no breaks until September 2008), my conference experience (before this gem, anyhow) consisted of science/technology and student leadership conferences in high school and an arts and business conference I attended two years straight at Queen's University. This was my first big kids conference and I therefore consider myself uniquely equipped to empirically recount observances of the unabashedly generalized kind.

Replacing the mostly attentive, incredibly enthusiastic (if a bit mischievous) high schoolers were ignorant, inattentive, rude-ass individuals. No one held doors, politely got out of the way if necessary or excused themselves for getting in anyone's way when that was the case. In any workshop at least half of the group could be overheard blatantly talking over the presenter, with no self-remorse or self-awareness. One woman was so determined to demonstrate to all twenty or so (completely disinterested) workshoppers that she knew more about herbs (yes, there was a workshop about herbs) than the guest speaker that I was truly concerned her head might snap off for its overzealous nodding. Another noted my planting of a second herb (for the colleague who was forced to be M.I.A.) with the greedy stare of a five year old child who has discovered another child's sucker is bigger than her own. You could see her bursting to tattle, until, finally, determining she could not go a second longer without having a comparable sucker of her very own, she plucked a second herb from the table and settled the score, narrating the whole experience ("Well, I didn't know we were allowed to plant two. Is everyone allowed to plant two? Well, I'm planting two. It's only really fair if I plant two"). She was approximately 50-60 years old...give or take 50 or 60 years.

Searing looks abounded, nothing was good enough, each individual knew more than every single presenter and everyone was too cool for school. Remember, like, grade five? Like that, except with no discipline or repercussions in the event of a misdemeanor (or several).

Well, they got one thing right. Nothing about this conference was good enough. Except my definition of "good" and theirs differ considerably.

Even universities have to face the realities of a recession (perish the thought!) and I continue to lose sleep at night knowing that each department spent at least $300/head so Mac employees could play with glue and magazine cuttings and plant two herbs (other activities included a yoga session and beet-cooking demonstration). The thing is, I'm entirely pro-conference and believe in team-building activities and all that crap but I don't think the planning committee could have possibly conceived a bigger and more expensive waste of time if they tried. Yep, it was pretty. Yep, it was shiny. But yep, we might as well have taken $200,000 and set it alight.

And that estimate is, in all likelihood, considerably low.

The worst part is this isn't the worst part. The opening keynote was unapologetically targeted at working mothers because apparently non-mother working women (and men, for that matter) do not exist. And when said keynote trilled the following anecdote (paraphrased), mine - as far as I could tell - was the only jaw to drop. I guess the original title of her book (because of course she had a book, available for sale in the lobby but please, she has requested no photographs be taken) was something like Inside Out: Straight Talk About Dealing With Cancer (roughly). But, oh no! Mere weeks before the book's publication her publisher phoned her in a tither, terrified at the prospect of having named a book by an upper-middle class, middle-aged, white working mother in a bone-chilling-ly similar way to a very different book by a homosexual man. Mark Tewksbury, as it turns out, had just published his own book, entitled Inside Out: Straight Talk from a Gay Jock. OMFG. What if, in their online, haphazardly clicking fervour, middle-aged working mothers across the nation accidentally ordered this (abomination) instead of hers? Imagine their HORROR (I really wish I were exaggerating this particular choice in wording but I really don't think I am) when they opened the couriered box and found that staring back at them.

I should have been less shocked to have found such proliferated closed-mindedness in such a venue and with such a group (generalization! I should really mark them in parentheses like this) and I probably shouldn't be so hard on a cancer survivor. After all, I'm not in the graduate seminar room anymore and the real world outside the Ivory Tower (sorry, kids!) is a very different place than the one we theorize. Hailing from a small Northern Ontario community, I, of all people, should have known that (again!).

So that was my day at my first work conference. Life-changing. I've probably been a little too brutal but I almost feel responsible for counteracting the complete hegemonic obliviousness of everyone else. And don't worry. These thoughts were recorded in detail for the planning committee to unceremoniously throw out. In fact, these comments could have won me a 13" flat screen TV. All I would have had to do is write my name and contact information...ON THE FEEDBACK FORM. Class, my friends. All the way.