Technology is a wonderful thing. I enjoy it a lot in my many hobbies and business pursuits, but in the hands of the unskilled, untrained, or worse legal people, it is a huge mistake.
Today we were to have an “online” training session using ATTconnect. I had little difficulty in getting into the forum for the presentation and once in promptly muted my microphone – actually I did not have on hooked up either on my older laptop but safe is better than sorry. As the participants continued to check in the noise and echos became over-powering. Nearly everyone that checked in had their microphones on and the audio turned up so that we heard conversations in the background everywhere.
When the instructor came on he, I guess, attempted to run the session from the built-in microphone on his computer. I guess that because we could not hear anything of what he said. Only pieces when other were not talking. Needles to say the training session was a total and complete failure and had to be cancelled and will be reschedule for sometime next week.
An old thought comes to mind for this – The famous 5P’s principal – Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Well I get carried way and it is now the 6P’s. The more P’s you have the better it must be, right? It was obvious that there had been very little prior planning, practice or even testing of the presenters system. It was also obvious that the users were in worse shape than the presenter as none of them realized, even with multiple messages to all, that they needed to turn off their mics. I would guess that some though that if they used a headset and had a boom mic they didn’t need to turn that off, WRONG!. It picks up other sounds just like the ones built-in but maybe not as much.
I hope that next week the presenters, and the control people do a bit of explaining in the notice email to ensure that more of the microphones are shut off so we can hear the one in charge. – WD0AJG