I spent the last few days at a conference of my peers, and I probably should be more careful about what I’m going to say, but I don’t want to.

I have a busy month – I will be traveling or working part of every weekend between now and the first weekend in March, and this was the first salvo.  On Sunday, I flew up to an unnamed city in the north.  It doesn’t particularly matter which one it was: as usual, these meetings are held in suburban areas populated by office buildings and chain restaurants.  Except for the trip to and from the airport (which took exactly five minutes and that only because we missed all of the traffic lights), I didn’t go farther than two blocks from the hotel at any point on this trip.

Here’s the way these things work.  You arrive and are escorted to conference registration.  In this case, there was no pre-registration, so for two days we were all walking around with hand-written nametags in a myriad of fluorescent (and frequently unreadable) colors.  Someone in the sponsoring office, a federal agency not known for its sense of humor, had apparently decided to exhibit some personality by buying the pastel colored pack of Sharpie markers.  Note to anyone in the conference planning business: these colors don’t go so well on nametags.

One of the major north/south divides that I have recognized since I moved to Texas from DC has to do with formal attire.  I now chafe at the notion of having to wear a necktie like a ten year old boy in a clip-on.  Northern men love them.  Southern men?  Well, we like not wearing neckties when we can get away with it, and we’re all in favor of considering a nice pair of jeans “formal attire.”  Up north, that doesn’t go over so well. 

And so …

I am firmly of the belief — and in a moment of levity, I actually put this on the evaluation form — that there should be a minimal IQ requirement to attend conferences.  Perhaps that’s a bit extreme.  I think maybe the requirement should be there only if you actually plan to ask a question.

For example: it was revealed that — and, sit down folks, this one’s a shocker — Congress wants to determine whether the money it’s offering up in student aid for foreign language study is actually encouraging students to take jobs where they have to use the foreign language skills that they developed with that aid.  The way some people in the plenary session carried on about this, you’d have thought that Congress wanted to take a sample of each student’s DNA so that they could track their movements by satellite for the rest of their natural life:

*hand goes up*
“Um, so am I to understand that you want us to keep track of these students just because we give them a federally funded scholarship?  Have you considered the privacy violations?  I don’t know if, ethically, I want to be part of this,” said the concerned woman in the front row.

The rest of us rolled our eyes.  You see, what Congress wants is aggregate data: 45% of graduates found relevant employment, 55% did not, or something like that.  There’s no privacy violations in aggregate data.  And, furthermore, we all mumbled to each other, if she didn’t want to be part of it, the rest of us would be more than happy to sacrifice ourselves by taking the money she didn’t want anymore.

Also, we’ve been required to track this stuff for the past fifty years.

Anyway.  I flew back late last night straight into office drama — my favorite.  I had that sort of strange energy today where I was kind of hoping that problem child would engage me directly (all of the drama took place over e-mail), but alas.  The problem child didn’t try to engage me.  I had to be all diplomatic and stuff.  Jeez.

I hope your week is going well!