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

[Tim Walker]

These are great, Tom — thanks.

On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 10:38 AM Tom Henderson <thenderson at extremelabs.com>
wrote:

> 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 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
>
> --
> Ipg-smz mailing list
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>


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