Entre Les Murs

November Drizzle

Yesterday was not a great day: dreary weather reflected slow progress inside; my computer hard disk failed catastrophically; and the lecture I attended in the evening proved more than usually opaque.

I have been a regular attendee at presentations by the local chapter of the Project Management Institute, and while I have yet to engage in deep conversations about the technicalities of French project work, I have been growing increasingly confident of my ability to follow the lectures.  I guess I've had some help in this from the fact that presenters often have their Powerpoint presentations, or components of them, in English.  Presumably they were originally intended for a general audience or have been obtained from a multinational parent.  Yesterday evening, the speakers were of a higher than average quality: they both spoke easily, engaging with the audience, cracking jokes and talking without notes.  The second of the two, the director of Gaz de France's large clients department, didn't even bother with slides. 

The topic was Knowledge Management, something with which I already know a bit, so I was expecting an interesting evening.  But because they were so comfortable in front of the crowd, the spoke in a relaxed and easy fashion, with less deliberate and formal language and without as many other visual cues, I wound up regularly out to sea.  I could follow most of a sentence, but I always seemed to lose the thread at the keyword.


It's a pretty poor day when the highlight is a shopworn puppet on the metro whose entire act is to sing a recorded "Speedy Gonzalez" ditty.

posted 22.11.06