All Bets are Off

All bets are off when computers take turns breaking down, our LED projector dies, my email provider lets me down, and I can barely connect to the web at all. Such is the experience I had last week at the workshop I was managing for my office. I ended up running most of our slide shows off of my own laptop, which I had brought almost by accident, bypassing a Lenovo that refused to work correctly with our pointing devices and an HP that stopped running for no apparent reason one day. Score one for my old Dell laptop.

Our trusty Epson projector turned off at lunchtime during the second day due to the fact that its bulb needed to be replaced. Unfortunately, whoever bought the projector never thought to buy replacement bulbs, and I, in preparing for the workshop, hadn’t realized this and never thought to try and calculate how many hours the bulb had been used already. Luckily, the folks at the conference facility were able to loan me another projector. They told me that if it had been a day earlier, they wouldn’t have had any extra projectors for me to rent, because there had been such a big demand.

Wireless is spotty at best at this off-campus facility. If I sat in the southwest corner of the meeting room and made a couple of imploring prayers to His Noodly Appendage, I could get a weak but serviceable signal. However, imagine my delight on the first day of the workshop as I was checking in registrants and waiting for everyone to come in, to see a notice in my work email (specifically, my Marshall address: the Marshall School of Business runs its own email servers separately from the rest of USC). One of the computer guys who oversees the Help Desk was emailing everybody in the Business School to let us know that our email system was experiencing problems receiving email from anywhere outside of the Marshall  system. Thus, we could only receive emails from people within Marshall on Wednesday morning.

This lasted for four hours, meaning that if anyone who had registered for the workshop, and perhaps had to cancel at the last minute, had emailed me about their change of plans, I wouldn’t have known about it until the first day was half-over. (Even if the wireless signal in the room was non-existent, I can access my work email via my Treo.) A four-hour delay? That’s simply unacceptable. I am now contemplating whether I should stop using my Marshall address for work and instead send everyone to a Google email address, as these types of delays have happened before in Marshall, but never for so long.

All of these occurrences, however, made me extremely aware of the fragile nature of technology. If everything had broken at once, we would have been the lowest of low-tech – real speakers and paper copies of their slides. Which, to be honest, would have worked just as well. Face-to-face communication still trumps everything. With our lousy luck last week, I’m just grateful that none of the presenters included any kind of live, online component in their talks. I can’t even say we’d be relegated to shadow puppets, since my LED projector was one of the things that broke down!