Keeping it Live.

A new experience this week. Performance by phone and internet.

Usually when travelling abroad on a job, I advise whoever I'm working for that its dangerous for me to travel out on the same day as the job. If flights are cancelled or delayed, the job can be screwed and the client still has to pay once they have confirmed my booking.

This particular client had decided that starting a job at 2pm in Amsterdam meant that I could fly out the same morning at 9:25 AM from London City. That flight lands normally at 11:40 AM Amsterdam time giving me around two hours to get to the office which is perfectly reasonable. The next flight from London City however is of course one hour 15 minutes later, and London City airport is notoriously the first to be fogbound when the weather is inclement. And inclement it was on Wednesday morning. I had started out early in order to defeat the tube strike, and actually the journey by overground  and Docklands light Railway was probably even better than it normally is so I was at the airport by 8 AM. Everything on the departure boards was showing cancelled or delayed, a situation that still existed at 10:30 AM that morning. A phone call to the person I was working in Amsterdam, the redoubtable Jack Downton, and the suggestion was made that as we were doing telephone skills role-play, perhaps it might now be more sensible if I went home, and we did the role plays over the telephone, and linked up over face time to give the feedback.

So it was that at 1:30 PM I was sat in front of my computer, with notebook and telephone at the ready to be the general counsel for the chemical transportation firm based in Slough! Three phone calls later, and it was time to hook up on FaceTime to season three young Dutch lawyers I'd been speaking to and give them feedback on how they handled the scenario.

The technology worked reasonably well, but it did make me realise that so much of giving feedback in any situation is about reading the signs of the person you're giving it to. You have to be able to judge it carefully as to how robust you can be. There have been occasions as an actor when a director has popped in to see a show and had no time to stay afterwards and give notes during the run. Next day an envelope is lurking in your pigeonhole at the stage door on which the director has typed out some rough notes. They're reasonably well phrased, but they are abrupt and to the point.  No chance for the director to check your understanding of them, and of course if you don't really understand the note, you can't really play it. As in so many instances, it's not what is said - it's how it's said that matters. 

I can understand that the client was probably rubbing their hands together in glee thinking that all telephone skills courses could now be run without me having to go to Amsterdam at all. But of course, the effectiveness of the session was lessened by my absence. 

I suppose it's just like theatre really. You have to be there for it to work at its best. It's live. It's there in the moment. And it's never the same on two consecutive occasions. It all depends on the people there at the time.

The client got the message, and I will be flying out on the evening before the job on the next two occasions. Good new for the Avios points!