Mannerisms

Emerging from the Jubilee Line at Canning Town is to find yourself in a Third World-y type of landscape. 'I suppose it's halfway to Essex', I thought, and then the ghastly thought struck me: 'Maybe it is Essex'. Onto the Docklands Light Railway, and a rickety-rackety ride to Custom House, and the depressing moment when you realise there are no escalators, just some bleak concrete steps covered by dirty, Perspex, followed by a soulless walkway to ExCel.

In the Jumeirah's huge conference hall there were desks to sit at and park a laptop and a notebook, so you could take notes of proceedings, and be in touch with the office via instantly connected and strongly signalled Wifi. At Excel the conference was in a too-small room furnished only with stacking chairs, so there was nothing to put a laptop or notebook on. Making notes is difficult in such circumstances and using a laptop very tricky.

And WiFi? Initially there wasn't any. 'We have engineers working on it', said an ExCel staffer. When the WiFi eventually got fixed there was a limitation on the number of people who could use it, explained by an asinine note from the organisers which read: 'If you have any trouble logging onto the network, please ensure there are less than the maximum of  64 users using the Hotspot before contacting the ITC Helpdesk'. Oh yeah? Trot round the delegates asking them if they're connected? Do me a favour. I never managed to get a connection.

So while, as a journo, I could make notes and type up four to five stories a day from the Jumeirah, and email them back to the office, the amount of stories I could send  from ExCel was precisely nil. Instead of tables and chairs for lunch as at  the Jumeirah, and as found at any other civilised venue for that matter, you had to stand up to eat your lunch at Excel.

 And whereas there was unlimited wine for lunch at the Jumeirah, there was not a drop of alcohol at ExCel. I spotted a promising looking ruby fluid in a wine glass. "Cranberry juice", responded a catering lady mournfully and sympathetically.

There were no advance copies of the presentations at ExCel or, so far as I could find, any subsequent ones. And all of this is really odd because the IET has a fabulous, panelled, well-equipped, comfortable conference hall at its Thames-side, central London HQ, surrounded by lovely watering holes like the Savoy Grill and Simpson's. The only watering hole near ExCel is, I expect, a kebab shop.

So why treat people, and above all why treat distinguished foreign visitors of which there were quite a few, to such a miserable experience? Especially when the quality of the presentations and the discussions was absolutely first-class?