[Ipg-smz] Your conference-call horror stories & banalities, please.

[Tom Henderson]

 From my ugly conf call memories:

1) PR and Company CEO think they're on mute or haven't heard my entrance 
tone. PR company is in the midst of a long diss of the publication I'm 
representing, calling out chapter and verse for each of their top staff. 
Epithets and expletives abound. CEO is digesting the background. Oh, you 
heard about X from Y pub? Five minute story about taking two journos on 
a drunken #MeToo experience. Said he caught a case of something. PR 
person snickers. I clear my throat. You'd have thought a completely 
different pair of individuals were subsequently on this call.

2) Had a nine-person conf call. CEO/founder, VP marketing, product 
manager, geeks from Israel and India on speakerphones, PR person 
desperately trying to manage the call, and a product engineer. 
Fortunately, they knew how to use mute controls. The rest: Total mayhem, 
with mayhem slides, then the app demo that switched back and forth 
between machines, and nothing worked at all, period, for the entire 
wasted hour. Nine sheepish goodbyes.

3) We have a conf call to tell a product manager that his stuff actually 
doesn't work, and why. This is impossible for him to believe, so we 
switch into view screen mode. He watches the problems with his own eyes. 
He yells, "FU A$$holes" and terminates the call. An hour later, a 
request from the VP to do a conf call. Rinse repeat the demo from our 
side. "Hooooolleeeeeeyyyy F" is his response. Next morning, another and 
final conf call, final because we don't get paid to teach vendors their 
mistakes. It's the coder. I fixed it, he says. A week later, we've 
checked it. Nope, not fixed, smoking crater with scents of sulfur. They 
were bought by a certain three letter company two weeks later for almost 
a billion dollars.

4) Product manager in Israel does a skype conf call. Very late in the 
day for him. He didn't realize his cam was on. Naked, of course. Very 
hairy guy. Eventually, he realizes this and the screen goes blank, but 
not the audio. I hear a scramble while he's talking. Call is cut short. 
Oddly and perhaps for the same reason, he leaves the company not long after.


Tom



On 10/10/2018 10:11 AM, Tom Geller wrote:
> Funny you should ask this, because Cracked.com <http://Cracked.com> 
> had a somewhat-related listicle yesterday:
>
> http://www.cracked.com/pictofacts-1104-21-hilariously-cringeworthy-moments-from-live-tv-shows/
>
> It includes the famous "baby running into the room" conference call (#19)
>
> #21 had me rolling on the floor.
>
> ---
> Tom Geller  *  Writer & Video/journalist  * http://tomgeller.com
>        Rotterdam, The Netherlands, +31 (0)6 87071468
>             Oberlin, Ohio  *  +1-415-317-1805
>
>
>
>

-- 
Tom Henderson
ExtremeLabs, Inc.
+1 317 250 4646
Twitter: @extremelabs
Skype: extremelabsinc

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