There's always one

[skull_bearer]

If you've ever been to a meeting or a conference open to the public, You'll know what I'm talking about. It happens every time. That one person who asks an obvious/irrelevant/stupid/insulting question and will not shut up and keeps talking about it for five minutes while the speakers pretend to be taking it seriously and everyone else is quietly facepalming. This one took the cheese for not only being insulting, but also completely incomprehensible. It didn't help that this was at the tail end of a six hour conference which had mostly entailed four historians sniping at each other (mental note, never put an Israeli historian, two German historians and an opinionated English historian in the same room) and no air con, so everyone was pretty much falling asleep in their chairs.

I have no idea what the question was, only it started off with the guy trying to prove that Jews are a biological race, wandered into Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene and finally ended on the note that the Wannsee conference house was next door to a house by a famous Jewish expressionist painter. It took about ten minuters, during which I had the honour of seeing one fo my tutors doing a massive facepalm. Watching the historians trying to find a coherent responce to the words salad was also entertaining.

Seriously, that's the third time in a row that our conferences have been gatecrashed by at least one idiot. Can we have some sort of door policy? Screen for morons or something?

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

My favourite so far was a fantasy conference and a session on Zombies where a well known participant decided that we needed to talk about Real Housewives of America (a tv show I think).

[kathie-d.livejournal.com]

There was a lady on my friend's course at uni who did this EVERY LECTURE. I know at least one guy who quit uni because he couldn't deal with her constant de-railment. I was on some committees with her at the Student's Union, and got to the stage where everyone would just let her rant on for like a billion years, and then completely ignore everything she just asked.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Welcome to the wonderful world of historical conferences- it's an occupational hazard, I'm afraid!