Dichroic Reflections

one wasted day

My opinion of the Get Motivated! seminar I went to yesterday? If it comes to your town, don't go. It wasn't even worth getting out of the office for a day. The best thing about it was that I got about 4" done on sock #2, which I had foresightedly cast on the night before because I'm close enough to the end of sock #1 that I was afraid I'd run out of knitting. The final count was as follows:

• 1 speaker with no focus and several unrelated anecdotes, includingone he nabbed from Robert Fulghum.
• Two speakers whose entire substance was only a sales pitch for their (several hundred dollar) seminars, phrased so that wasn't obvious until the end of the speech when they revealed the techniques they were discussing could only be used with further training and a $200 web site subscription.
• Two lousy singers including one who made the national anthem impossible to sing along to, then invited us to sing along with God Bless America and did the same thing to it.
• Two Christian preachers who totally blindsided me (I was expecting to hear about business, not religion) including the seminar producer who gave a literal out-and-out come-to-Jesus speech, and whose speech involved a lot of annoyingly bad logic, and another who gave us a list of four websites with information "disproving" evolution. (He certainly motivated me .... to walk out of the seminar. I didn't but only becaue we'd carpooled.)
• One general who gave a speech that was very funny and rah-rah patriotic but which had no content on any of the numerous interesting and useful things he could have discussed about his last campaign.
• One famous but agedcomedian whose speech was supposed to be about laughter as a business tool but was actually just a stand-up routine.
• 1 annoyingly perky mistress of ceremonies in an eye-smacking pink suit, running things. (I would have guessed she was on speed, but she and her husband run the seminars so I suspect she was merely buoyed up by the thought of all the profit they were making.)
• Two speakers I'd actually go hear agin, if I didn't have to sit through the rest of them to do it.

If you ever get a chance, Joe Montana and Rudy Giuliani are worth hearing speak. But if someone invites you to this seminar thing, run away. Or take your something to do and earplugs.

I have certainly learned my lesson, though. When I was invited to this seminar by a coworker, I didn't ask to see the brochure and read through it carefully. Someone told me the brochure did discuss exactly the sort of thing that would be discussed, including the religion, so if I wasted a day, it's my own fault for not checking up more carefully. I suppose this even falls into the "preparation" theme but Montana and Giuliani discussed. Actually, there's a second lesson as well: when stuck in a situation like this, carefully monitor anyone who talks about leaving. My boss and another guy snuck back to work (in the latter's car) while I wasn't watching them