I’m starting to reconsider decision on not continuing my career in academia after (if) I finish my PhD. There are some advantages in staying at the university after all. Conferences in exotic places are definitely one of them. Caribbean, sun, sea and unlimited free alcohol, all paid from university founds.
This year Zing Organometallic conference is hosted on Antigua, small Caribbean island, which as few people underlined has 365 beaches, one for every day of the year. Resort where the conference takes place is all inclusive (free booze!) with nice private beach and free water sports. Conveniently enough flights to Antigua from Manchester are only on Fridays, so we had a whole week for ourselves. Additionally during the three days of the conference we had a huge, six hours break in the middle, between morning and the evening talk sessions. We couldn’t really complain that there’s not enough of free time.
Surprisingly (at least for me – as I usually consider lectures as waste of time) most of the sessions were really good. The few that weren’t that painful really as the conference centre had wireless, so lots of people were browsing internet or checking email. There were few interesting individuals (or freaks, like my boss called them) at the conference that probably deserve a short mention. The first one is little hunched ancient Romanian lady. She was late for the first session in spite of being already in the Resort at least since the morning. She came in the middle of the first talk stinking like a tobacco factory and fell asleep snoring loudly almost immediately. She didn’t bother coming to any other of the sessions except the one she was talking at. We’ve seen her occasionally in the Resort, usually during meals, when she was stuffing leftovers into her handbag. She didn’t really speak to anyone (except the other Romanian person that came with her) and we’ve found out why during her talk. Her English was poor at best. She read her introduction from a piece of paper and then proceeded to reading contents for her slides from the screen. She had numerous slides, consisting mainly of text in quite a small font. If chairman wouldn’t make her finish when she was running out of time, her talk would probably took an hour or longer. Obviously she wasn’t really happy with that and she spend the next talk talking in loud indignant Romanian to her companion.
The other probably person worth mentioning is a mysterious Russian looking guy with a questionable sense of fashion. According to the abstract booklet he was supposed to present a poster, however I haven’t seen him doing that. He seem to take the casual elegant dress code too literately. For the whole time of the conference he was wearing a polo shirt (same one everyday) with a dash of elegance in a form of purple tie. We’ve tried to spot him at the beach, to see if he’s also wearing a tie, but we haven’t seen him there.
Another person that will remain in our memories for long wasn’t really related to the conference. He just happened to stay in the same resort. We didn’t got his name, but knowing that he’s Canadian and that he’s rude – we called him Terrence. We met him on the beach, he just came to our parasol, pushed our sun beds away and pushed his one into the shade. At first we didn’t really know what he wanted and if he’s being serious. But he pointed to us that we weren’t using them at the time and he wanted some shade. Why did he wanted to lye in between five stranger will remain mystery, especially that there was lots of shade from the palm trees around and another empty parasol just next to us.
He went to sleep after some extensive verbal abuse from my boss (never seen him being so rude). He left after a while, obviously not appreciating noise we were making. Not that we were much more noisy than usual, but me made a point in playing bit-bat almost above his head.
If you happen to know Terrence – please contact me immediately – as we’d love to know who he is.
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