... and I got stuck in this dull one.
There are various reasons for choosing which session to attend when there are
parallel sessions taking place. Sometimes we attend those where friends of ours
are presenting, sometimes we feel a professional commitment to hear somebody else's
research on a topic that we're involved with. And sometimes we read the abstracts
and say to ourselves "now that sounds interesting", so we attend that
particular session.
And then we discover that what seemed to be interesting on paper is immensely
boring in a presentation, but since we don't like it when people get up and walk
out when we're presenting, we sit through to the end anyway. A
few columns ago I used a cocktail party metaphor to describe how we often
restrain ourselves from jumping fully into one particular topic so that we'll
be able to jump ship and become involved in something more interesting if and
when one comes along. That same metaphor applies here as well. As we read through
the abstracts, trying to decide where we should place ourselves for the coming
hour and a half, rather than asking ourselves what we'll gain from attending a
particular session, we ask what we're going to miss if we don't attend the others.
Go to: The tedium of real time.