Christian Lindholm mentions the amount of multi-tasking he noticed amongst E-Tech attendees. Personally, I’m pretty sure that anyone with a laptop in front of them at a meeting isn’t really listening. I’ve been in my fair share of meetings where I’ve moved the pointer around the screen in endless circles to avoid listening to the most boring speaker on the planet (or so it appeared at the time).

Of course, those multi-taskers will claim they were listening and they were doing some important work. This may be true but I’d argue that they were working on the computer and only listening for anything interesting in the talk – they were actually paying attention to the laptop and not the speaker. Indeed, I don’t believe it’s possible to operate a computer without paying attention to it (ok, beyond touch typing that is).

This brings me to another curious animal at conferences: people who must grab the closest seat to the exit. You can often spot these people running around with a boat-load of equipment (laptop, papers, folders, bags, power cables etc) and they’re either late or very very early. They grab the closest seat to the exit and won’t give it up for a disabled granny, loudly annoucing that they “might have to dash off”. As a speaker, I make it a point to ignore these rude people (except possibly when they’re my boss).