Semi-conferences and past lives

Saturday 26th August
Today I came into the hospital for 8am on a saturday morning for some nebulous affair which the Big Boss informed us was a three-line whip affair (not in so many words, obviously, as I don't think that translates into French). Doing ward rounds with Drs. Abdou and Fifi was quite pleasant, but at 9 we were summoned to the meeting room, where a lot of abnormally well-turned out doctors were lounging around. Of the qualified doctors, only Dr. Abdou was dressed as he normally is, and we were in fact late as when we were initially summoned he had growled "we'll finish this ward".

We then sat in the meeting room. Until 10am, when a portly man in oversized glasses and his nervous-looking sidekick showed up and began setting up a computer; I say began because the projector was projecting precisely nothing, and the two of them and the Big Boss sat looking confusedly at it and the computer in turn. So I trudged up and, with a definite sinking feeling, turned the laptop on. The Big Boss then refused to let me plug the projector back in, saying urgently that we needed to wait! So I did, and lo and behold, it worked. I sat down.

Over the next 45 minutes, I kept having to go up to the computer, first because they couldn't get the USB key to work. Then the images were missing from it (not much I could do about that one). Then they couldn't get the file to open. I tried everything, buoyed by the Big Boss' invaluable supporting monologue, which consisted largely of telling me to do things I had just finished, telling me what to do on screens I am quite sure she had never seen before, or explaining very slowly such technological intricacies as the loading-progress bar to me (apparently, it tells you how loading is progressing, astonishingly). It was a total joy.

Ultimately, despite the benefit of her vast expertise, the plump man and his sidekick gave their talk without the slides, and everyone sat in the room for two hours to hear a fifteen minute presentation without even any bloody pictures. It made me positively nostalgic for the conference, let me tell you...