Conference, part 1

Last week I was invited to attend a teleconference, as part of a larger conference, with students in Pennsylvania. They wanted me there partly to help with any English questions. Unfortunately the conference didn`t go that well. There were a lot of technical problems, which seems to often be the case with these kinds of things. First we couldn`t hear each other, than one side could hear, now both, oh...we lost you again, etc. Plus the time delay is always tricky. There was some exchange back and forth, but it was still disappointing. They were chatting (we typed and they talked), once all hope was lost, and decided to try again the next day, but with fewer people and with a less high-tech approach which might have fewer problems.

Some of the students here agreed to meet at the university and then go to the Pennsylvania professor`s house, one had come here to help facilitate the exchange. It was going to be there because the conference was using all the rooms for other things that day. We met and headed to the bus stop. The first bus was full which means we probably would be later than we said. We call the professor to find out that she had sent one of us an email in the morning saying that she was canceling the teleconference. The problem is the person a) doesn´t have email at her house and b) probably wouldn´t have checked it even if she had. Students here are not obsesive-compulsive about their email like at home. The professor had sent an email earlier in the morning to her students in Penn. asking them if they were still coming and noone had replied either way. Some of our students were already missing class, which is much more serious here and you need some sort of note of explanation, so they still wanted to try and see if the students in Penn. would show up, but the professor didn´t want to. We explained to her that we were on the bus and already on the way, but she basically told us, well...you can get off the bus at the next stop. (I wasn´t the one talking to her, but that was the relayed message) We were a little hurt. It didn´t seem like that big of a deal to see if they were there or not. If they didn`t show up, they didn`t show up. We wouldn`t be any more disappointed and at least that way we knew we had done what we said we would. That is how it seemed to us anyway.

We ended up going back to the school :(