Start off with a seminar.  I want to be inspired, energized, taught something.  The speaker is an excellent speaker.  But his presentation is too basic.  It is also too rigorously detail oriented in a way that would never work for me.  Fortunately I have my laptop.

The great thing about having a laptop in a seminar is it doesn’t look disrespectful to the speaker.  They only see the back of a computer.  And can assume that we are listening intently and taking notes.

I can remember being at seminars where people in the audience would act quite rudely.  I used to cringe thinking how much time the speaker put into preparing for the presentation.  How the fragile speaker’s ego would wither under with these blows.   Here are some of those audience behaviors:

• Walk out
• Read the newspaper – rustling the big pages and holding it up in front of their face
• Talk on the cell phone – loudly and for an entire conversation
• Talk to neighbors
• Go to sleep
• Sleep to the point of snoring
• Bring stacks of documents to work on

Actually most of these behaviors still go on – but the computer helps better disguise them.