Epic Networking Fail - Again!

Side note: Yes, I know, all the posts lately are either a wee bit sad, or a wee bit "life is annoying" or all about business. At the moment, I've got nothing funny to share - but since I never promised you a stand up routine on this blog, you'll just need to roll with it. Or maybe go read the whole guinea pig thing again - because let's face it, a fat chick chasing down a scared guinea pig is pretty damn funny.

So.

Yesterday morning I went along to a networking breakfast thing with a friend of mine - and shock of all shocks, I was quite keen to go. The speaker is someone who I have heard about for a long time and I was interested to see him 'up close and personal' so I didn't hesitate to accept the invitation.

I make no secret of the fact that for me networking is akin to shoving hot pokers in my eyes. I hate it. HATE IT. Which when you think about it is kinda funny for someone who can converse rather animatedly with a brick wall, but there you go. It probably goes back to my inherent hatred of sales guys, I just can't stand knowing that these people are being nice to me because they want to sell me something. Sure, some of them are just being nice because they are nice people ...but ...ehh, I just don't like the whole networking thing. Or rather, I'm no fan of formal networking - the people who know me in real life would probably say I'm an ace networker when it comes to walking into a room with a bunch of strangers and walking out with them all being my best friend.

So - I agreed because I was excited about hearing the speaker and he was in fact interesting to listen to (if a little manic, OMG did that man have ten coffees before his talk or what? I was literally exhausted after just listening to him for an hour.) I wouldn't say he had any earth shattering information to share, but then that wasn't really the point anyway (although there were plenty of people taking copious notes. Which I don't know how they did that, because he was talking so damn fast that by the time you wrote anything down, you had missed half his talk.)

ANYWAY the interesting part about this (this post is running away from me...must...stop...waffling!) is that I managed to go along to this thing and basically miss the whole networking bit of it. There were something like 440 people there (!) and I managed to say hello to my friend on my left, and thanks to her introduction I nodded politely to the guy on my right. That was about it (but I did, after much digging around and faffing about) give the guy on my right a business card, and he has like a hundred kids (ok, four of them) and they all need cake right this very second. So that was good....but...yeah. I must be the only person in the world capable of going along to a super mega huge massive networking event and not network. Actually I've got a vague idea I've blogged about this superpower before - Oh look! I did! Twice! Yup, that's me, the networking loser.


Guru Guy would tell me that being an effective networker is all about practice - personally, I think being an effective networker is all about taking anti-anxiety drugs ahead of time, but what would I know? I'm too busy hiding in the corner to find out.