High Five!

While I am in a mildly effusive mood (and by effusive, I mean in the writing sense, rather than gleeful. The effusive of effluent rather than the effusive of ebullient. If that makes any sense. I suspect not, but a lovely turn of phrase), I thought I would share something that happened today. We are holding a bilateral conference with a smaller nation that is proving to be somewhat of a nightmare (I say this like this is a rarity, they always are). The other side are being little help, and have turned what was going to be a substantive thing into potentially something less. I am not surprised, as it looked that way to me from the beginning, but still, it is mildly bothersome.

This whole thing has been a nuisance. It is turning out to be tough to get anyone from our side there, as they are ultimately a relatively small place (and we are discovering there is no one at any of the major diplomatic departments that actually knows the topic). This has also (naturally) impacted the audience we are getting. One of my colleagues who has been helping has also been sending out invitations that I would not consider appealing (if she reads this, and recognizes who she is, I apologize. I am immensely grateful that she accepted to do this). Now the senior scholar is getting his knickers in a twist about it (he has traditionally got a bit of a bug in his ear about one of the subjects of discussion), but this is problematic as he is subsequently not helping with the actual thing. The Bosses boss got involved as it turned out that the very distinguished elder statesman who we have involved was confused about his role on the agenda. That was a fun meeting to be in. Now people are vaguely concerned and I have a growing sense of impending doom. While I have passed this on to a colleague to run, all the senior people keep coming to me as though it was my conference, which makes me feel all the more paranoid about it going right. But having passed it on to her, I have only a cursory knowledge of what is actually going on. Something of a nightmare for someone with my jumpy disposition. Anyhoo – I have another conference to freak out about myself now – so I am off to do that.

But I almost forgot the real reason I was writing about this. As if to cap off what smells of being a doomed conference, my boss asked me about it this morning and I told him we were great. He went to high five and we completely missed each other. Very auspicious.