No Heckling. Period.

Last week I was browsing through MS Office Online to find a certificate of appreciation for the guest speakers at our conference this week.

They have customizable form letters, too, in case you're not sure what to say. Imagine my wonderment and delight when the first one I opened included a canned paragraph apologizing for the heckling. Does Microsoft have all their bases covered, or what?!*

Speaking of MS, let me pause to clarify, here, for the males among you, that PMS stands for "pre-menstrual syndrome." It's a bout of mild** hormonally-induced moodiness that hits, oh, about a week before a woman's period. So women aren't PMSing when they're actually on the rag. That would really be MSing, or as some women*** euphemistically put it, "Bill Gates is paying a visit."

We've been working on this conference for months. I used to be a corporate meeting planner, so from my perspective it seems like a lot more effort has gone into the planning - considering we aren't working with an outside venue, or caterers, or AV staff, or hotel, or extraneous dinners or entertainment - than is strictly necessary. We have a few classrooms at work reserved; the AV equipment we need is all in there; the attendees are on their own for meals, lodging, and travel; and our section director has bought coffee for everyone. What's to plan?

Of course, as a meeting planner, I was never part of the proceedings, whereas in this case I did have to come up with a presentation on one of our work processes that I'll be giving in front of about 75 people. Luckily, PMS hasn't yet convinced me that I'll suck. Then again, I attended the dry runs of everybody else's presentations, many of which were, well, dry. I tried to make mine interesting. Considering that the whole thing, including my speaker notes which I never meant anyone else to see,**** got burned to the DVD that's getting handed out to all the attendees, I may have been more successful than I intended.

So I'm up on Wednesday morning, if you want to come see me wax rhapsodic about what I do at work. But you better not heckle me, or Bill Gates will kick your ass.

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*If you don't count Vista
**Your mileage may vary
***Me
****"Welcome. I am your shiny new minute order goddess. Fear not, mortals."