Today was the last day of the European conference, and my last day to try to reclaim the money for my plane flight.
I woke up still feeling exhausted. I thought about just calling the conference organizer, but I knew the only way anything was going to get negotiated was if I went down to the conference in person.
I was feeling pretty negative. All I could really hope for at this point was finding Eddie, tricking him into giving me his last name, and then threatening him with a lawsuit/police action for fraud. Not fun, and considering the language and geographic obstacles, probably not even possible.
And of course, Eddie never did appear, so I was left just talking to the head guy.
It took all morning, but eventually we negotiated that I would be paid for half my flight in exchange for speaking at the conference. (Not saying anything = great negotiating tactic)
Originally it looked like another speaker wasn’t going to show, so I was asked if I could speak on five minutes notice.
Ummm. I guess so.
Fortunately, the other speaker did show up, so I ended up with about three hours. Three hours to prepare a speech that would be given to 800 people.
I was asked to talk about connecting with people, so I did, but the audience was exhausted and received the talk really, really, really badly. Part of the problem is that the topic lends itself to a more serious conversation. From here on out, I’m sticking to high-energy, fun topics when I speak.
I brought up a couple guys to do a demo onstage, basically a before and after display, but I got cut off ten minutes early (out of 40 minutes) so all the audience saw was the “before”. And they didn’t give me time to do a sales close, so there’s just some footage of me yelling out a website as I walk offstage.
I’m pretty disappointed with how everything went down. So much wasted potential.
On the bright side, on my way home I passed a store that sold man-tards (They’re not gay, they’re just European. OK, perhaps they’re gay and European.) and ate dinner at an Indian restaurant with the tackiest chandelier ever.
