Quoting some clever dude doesn't mean...

That you are clever, so when I see the wildest signature lines on emails in my Outlook inbox, I do get a bit horrified. See, I've become pretty accustomed to ignoring terribly long legal disclaimers about why I shouldn't read the PR email that I have been sent about some terribly fascinating launch of a washing machine which washes clothes but promises to remove the skid marks from your undies. And then I read some line from Bernand Shaw or worse still, I saw a line from Neruda recently on some pointless PR email. Here is the problem, PR emails are technically not spam, but they're just one level below it, I really don't want to get most of them. Of course, if the PR world stopped emailing they would call me, and given that my phone number is known to half the living universe, that won't really help matters.
Anyway, I was just tagged by Nikhil to describe the funniest thing I have ever seen at a conference. Now I have to state up front, I've been a journalist for over six years and I must have attended close to 1000 press conferences in that time, because for a lot of those six years I was at the bottom of the food chain. So I've seen a lot of funny things - I've seen Richard Stallman (funny), Steve Ballmer (funnier), Nandan Nilekani (sleepy), assorted Japanese and Korean executives (hilarity), naked women (not in India, but I have seen almost naked women in India), very drunk senior executives slurring on stage while trying to grope the hostess' ass and the hostess making a monumental boo-boo and watch my big boss squirm as she did that.
But the funniest thing I have seen at a conference was completely my doing and technically I didn't see it. Several years ago during a particularly painful Powerpoint, I fell asleep and started snoring. Pretty loudly I was told. And when the PR chiquita went to wake me up I supposedly didn't use the nicest language with her. Best of all, a colleague with a camera caught a lot of the said event. There goes my budding political career. Oh yeah, there was also this time when Richard Stallman dressed up as an angel/god at the AirJaldi conference, but thats Stallman for god's sake. What else? I've seen senior executives with their flies undone, people who desperately need to go to language school and Shah Rukh Khan being Shah Rukh Khan and many of the women journalists losing all objectivity (though that was worse at a Abhishek Bachchan event). I've gotten pretty drunk at post-conference parties and a lot more... but this isn't the place for such stories.