Embarrassing moments in philosophy

I thought it might be fun to lighten things up a bit and share some of the most embarrassing things that we've either done or have happen to us in our professional career as philosophers. Here are my two contributions...

During the first year of my first job after grad school (at the University of British Columbia), I got invited to give a talk at a university on Vancouver Island. As I'd never been there before, you have to take a ferry to get to the island, and I'm a bit neurotic about getting to places early (I hate being late!), I decided to get there an hour early. The only problem was that when I actually got to Vancouver Island University, I learned that the building where my talk was supposed to be held didn't exist there. Why? Well, because my talk wasn't at VIU at all: it was at the University of Victoria! Oops. You see, while I'm almost pathologically averse to being late to things, I'm also definitely pathologically averse to planning trips well. So, yeah, I had to rent a car, drive all the way to the other side of the Island, and got to my own talk about 40 minutes late. Not exactly my finest hour. Fortunately, the department that organized the talk was really understanding about it, everybody stuck around, the talk went well, and we had a nice dinner and drinks out. In other words, everything ended well--but it was mortifying! 

My second story happened just a couple of months ago. I was scheduled to give a talk at the first meeting of the PPE Society, which was organized by Geoff Sayre-McCord and quite frankly was one of the best conferences I've ever been to (do submit to next year's conference - it was awesome!). Anyway, because I was excited about my paper, and I just happened to be on a three-person panel with two pretty high-profile people--Jason Brennan (Georgetown) and David Schmidtz (Arizona), both of whom I knew from my grad school days at Arizona--I worked my butt off for several days to put together a killer Powerpoint presentation. Because our session was just after lunch, I decided to get to the room about a half-hour early to make sure everything worked, technology-wise. I put up my Powerpoint on the screen, and everything looked great. So, when the session began, I felt pretty good. Well, I was pretty nervous as people began filling in, as the room eventually was standing-room only. In fact, there were people sitting all over the floor, which was pretty cool!

Anyway, everything started well-enough, but went bad pretty quickly. Jason gave his talk first, followed by Q&A--which unfortunately the session-chair let go on way too long. Since I was scheduled to go after Jason and before Dave, I already felt like I'd have to rush through my talk, as I didn't want to leave Dave without enough time. Alas, that wasn't the worst of it. When I got up to talk and scrolled to the second slide in my talk (right after my title slide), I discovered the presentation didn't fit on the screen. Of course, the title screen fit fine. Unfortunately, I hadn't thought to test whether the rest of the slides would fit too, and they didn't. I later learned that newer versions of Powerpoint automatically default to "wide-screen", and that the projector provided at the conference was incompatible with wide-screen. Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it, so every single slide in the presentation was cut off on both sides, meaning that each bullet-point in the presentation was impossible to read and the many diagrams I had (which were really important to the presentation) didn't fit either. It was a total disaster. I rushed and stammered though the whole thing...it was mortifying! I'm sure I was beet-red in the face from embarrassment all throughout Dave's talk. It was that bad. Or at least I thought it was. And I basically spent the rest of the day depressed. Fortunately, once again things actually turned out okay in the end: I had a number of people come up to me at happy hour who said they found the talk interesting and wanted to chat about it! That took a bit of the sting out of it. 

The morals of the stories? The first two morals, I guess, are these: plan well, and make sure your tech works! But the second moral, I think--in both cases--is that understanding, kind people can make a world of difference to embarrassing mistakes. I'm sure the people at the University of Victoria weren't happy about my mistake--but their kindness made it all okay in the end. Similarly, I'm sure my PPE talk was every bit the disaster that I thought it was--but here again, the kindness of those who came up to chat during happy hour made things okay. 

Anyway, these are my two embarrassing stories (of course, I have many more, but I'll leave it at that!). What are your most professionally-embarrassing stories?

Comments

[cw]

I had an on-campus interview. Two profs took me to lunch. I got the tortellini with red sauce. Half-way through, speared a tortellini, lifted, ... and it slipped off, splash, back into the sauce. Got me and one of the others. The moral, skip the tortellini.

[Italian]

cw,
you are never supposed to eat pasta while on job interviews. I think lasagna may have been invented to broaden the job-seeker's safe lunch and dinner options.

[Robert Gressis]

I was trying to come up with embarrassing moments, but I got nowhere. Then I tried to think of triumphs, and nothing came to mind either. Then I tried to think of just anything from my philosophy past, and nothing happened. I'm honestly shocked at how little of my life I remember.

[Marcus Arvan]

Ha - I made the pasta goof once myself. Critical information any job-seeker should know! ;)

[cw]

Now you tell me! It looked like comfort food.