O’DAY’S TRAVEL WOES #54: Audio/Visual Arguments in Tampa

September 1995 (continued): Here was my travel schedule for September/October/November:

September 6-9: New Orleans, Louisiana

Sept. 15: Tampa, Florida

Sept. 16: Wausau, Wisconsin

Sept. 21 – 22: Warsaw, Poland

Sept. 23: Hamburg, Germany

Sept. 24: Nuremberg, Germany

Sept. 25: Berlin, Germany

Sept. 26: Kiel, Germany

October 5: Hamilton, New Zealand

Oct. 6 – 7: Wellington, New Zealand

Oct. 8: Auckland, New Zealand

Oct. 14: Atlanta

Oct. 17: Philadelphia

Oct. 20: Louisville, Kentucky

November 5-6: Barcelona, Spain

You see the schedule for September 21 through September 26? There’s a word for that kind of travel/speaking schedule:

“Stupid.”

A week after the NAB Radio Show, I flew to Tampa to present How To Create Maximum Impact Radio Advertising for Paxson Communications’ annual sales meeting. (Drew Rashbaum had seen me do a version of this seminar at the RAB conference, and he arranged for me to speak at this meeting.)

This was a lot of fun; I love conducting this seminar for salespeople.

The first speaker of the day began at 7:30AM; I was scheduled to speak at 10:00. A 15-minute break was scheduled at 9:45, so I made sure I was in the meeting room by 9:30 to confer with the hotel’s audio/visual person.

All of the A/V equipment was to the far side of the speaker’s platform. In the back of the very large meeting room, I whispered to the A/V person, “We’ll need to move the DAT player and mixer next to the lectern.” (Remember, this was 1995…)

“Oh, we can’t do that,” she replied.

“Why can’t we do that?”

“It’s permanent,” she said.

“The A/V equipment is permanently placed there?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re telling me,” I said, “that first they built a permanent A/V area and then they built the hotel around it??”

“If you had a certain way you wanted things arranged,” she said, “you should have been here at 7 o’clock this morning to check with me. That’s what I would have done if I were going to be speaking to this group.”

“Well,” I replied, “perhaps they should have booked you as a guest speaker instead of me. But right now I don’t really care about the ways in which you would do my job better. What I care about it is arranging the A/V equipment in a manner that will maximize the experience for the attendees. And that means moving the equipment….Just like it says on that sheet of paper you’re holding with all of the detailed instructions they provided you with.”

What’s really ridiculous about this encounter is she argued about it for five minutes. Actually moving the equipment took one minute.