Second City: Second Conference

I’m now at my second conference (and city -- Amsterdam) of this trip and today is the "focus day" where we focus on a single topic. It officially starts, tomorrow. It’s a common format for these conferences to have a special day for workshops or a specific topic, either right before or right after the actual conference (usually two days).

One great thing that happened to me over the weekend is that I took the Heineken brewery tour and, while I was there, got to see an example of the Quality Control lab in action. They had a display that showed how their autosampler worked and the types of testing they were doing to ensure their beer was of the quality they desired. Seeing that they had this laboratory automation installed, I had to wonder what types of laboratory informatics were in-place but there didn’t seem to be anyone in a white lab coat around to answer the question, so I moved along...

Anyway, today I’m the chair at the IQPC Pharma IQ ELN Conference Focus day. I think that means I give a rousing call-to-action at the beginning, possibly introduce the speakers, and give a summary at the end of the day. That, plus I’m giving a presentation, myself, and am supposed to participate in some kind of roundtable, at the end.

If I sound a bit vague on some of this, it’s because it doesn’t matter that much to me. I’ll be there, so if they want me to introduce the speakers, that’s fine with me. If they don’t, my feelings aren’t hurt. I find that different conferences have different activities they require from their chairs and some of it isn’t that hard. For example, to introduce a speaker, they would give me the introductory material, then, I’d ask the speaker how much they want me to read of it (some want all, others want a summary), and I’d read it through to make sure I could pronounce it all and was familiar with it.

All that, plus I’m putting in half a day of customer work, too. As with last week, where activities with my customer were a bit slower, this week it yet slower, again, so my customer and I have agreed I’ll take a lot of time off, this week. However, I have also said I’d check my e-mail a few times a day to make sure nothing critical has popped-up. If something comes up, we’ll work something out. But I don’t expect that to happen.

By the way, here’s a funny (to me) story from last week’s conference. On the night of the first day of the conference, we had a reception next to the bar area. Near the end, a person who was clearly just staying at the hotel came to the small group of people I was clustered with and asked us what our group was all about. I had thought to point to the vendor booths, to start, but I realized that not a single booth that was there had graphics that indicated “laboratory” on them. Now, I am especially curious to see this week’s vendor booths to see how obvious they make it regarding what it is that they actually “do.”

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/