Maintain third-person neuter pronoun reality

"Seven years ago we added DQ into our stack" "decisioning" "what we call neo-real-time"

I thought it would be a conference featuring software users speaking with interest and enthusiasm about how they have employed a particular set of software packages to help them do their job.

If only...

I'm happy to say that the bloke from our team did a really good clear, concise and informative presentation with well-planned, simple and grammatically consistent slides. The same went for one other techie; he was enthusiastic, concise and believable.

The rest... brrrr. Of the two worst one was delivered by a manager/techie (who went through the slides too quickly to be able to match the huge swathe of lines, icons and multiply-worded annotations to the mumbled narration though he is apparently fine in face-to-face contacts but was just rushed into this and had no time to plan) and one by a more managery manager (lot's of speling mistakes, and grammatical errors, and, excessive punctuation!!!) who may have been obliquely mentioned somewhere before in this journal for his over-reliance on meaning-free suitspeak. Another was trying to be too funny, one hasn't stuck in my mind at all and one was an hour-long sales pitch by someone who spoke like the kid in school who wanted to pretend that they had a sort of mid-atlantic accent but who couldn't really pull it off because they just changed the accent on some sounds whilst leaving other bits intact whilst not using any particularly transatlantic idioms; pronouncing "data" as "dayda" rather than the more usual non-British English-speaking "dahta". There were many other just-change-the-T-to-a-D examples such as "compedidors", "indegraded", "disdribuded" and "actividy". I caught myself sighing and clutching my forehead several times and only noticed at the end that one of the bigwig organising-entities was sitting directly behind me. Hopefully he didn't catch the exasperated mutter which slipped out when the presenter made a typical managerish Powerpoint mistake.

I wonder sometimes if people think in the same voice they use when speaking and writing. Do neds and builders really think in expletives? Do management think in buzzwords? Do the current crop of students mentally insert "yeah, so" every six words? Bob only knows what passes through this gentleman's mind when he decides that he needs to go to the toilet. Even standing up must take a few minutes to organise.

As TFP has mentioned there were lots of free leather things being given away. As with my other inconventiently-sized souvenir office-document-transport folder things I shall use them for keeping printer paper nice and crispy on the floor under my desk at home.

Might stick some blipcards in the business card holder.