I am sat here, feet on desk, phone resting on my shoulder trying to work out if I can slash my wrists with a business card. Why you ask? Well to fully explain I need to go back over a hour, so sit comfortably and get ready for story time.

The Governor of the Asylum signed up to attend a BT teleconference on their plans to move some of their systems to a newer environment.  The only problem was, he decided to be visiting London Town for the scheduled appointment, So I was picked to fill in for him. On paper this sounds like a good thing, a couple of hour conference call where I could legitimately do no work.

I got my login details for the call and noticed the first problem. BT use Microsoft livemeeting for their conference calls, which is fine unless you run a Linux desktop. So for starters I would have to use the audio only phone part of the meeting, meaning I would not see the slides, the presentation or have access to the ongoing Q&A controls.

Feeling slightly annoyed to start off with, I follow the instructions and phone in five minutes before the conference is due to start. And get really annoying hold music which was on a two minute loop of the same tune. This very very annoying hold music continued for almost twenty minutes before the conference started.

Feeling very annoyed, I listen to the conference which seems to be almost fully talking about what we can see on the slides (What slides? audio only remember?). Another irritation was the fact there seemed to be several dozen people giving the talk. You would get one person introduce themselves, say a couple of sentences and then pass on to the next person who would do the same. This went on for over a hour, I lost count of the number of people we switched through.

Sometime in the last twenty minutes I really lost the will to live, since the constant droning in my ear from the voices in the phone are preventing me napping.

Oh, and the meeting, was a let you know what’s going on before the full meeting in January next year? Like I will remember any of this junk by tomorrow, let alone next year.