Areas of Unrest

26 August 1999 - Out of My League

I'm back from Huntsville and it was dreadful, though not quite for the reasons I expected it to be. Several of the conference presentations were interesting and informative so I can't say it was a total disaster from the work perspective. But, as expected, I had to alternate between the outside heat and humidity and the inside air conditioning which was overly aggressive to say the least. And, of course, this being Alabama, the food was unexciting at best and disgustingly fatty and salty at worst. But all of that pales next to the simple fact that I kept feeling like I had no business being there.

What I mean by that is that I swear that I was the only person there who was not: a) a high ranking military officer (colonel or above; there were several three-star generals), b) a high ranking civilian member of government (ambassador / undersecretary / program manager/ etc.) or c) the CEO of a major defense corporation. I am exagerrating some - there were some people who were just vice presidents of their corporations. And all of these people all knew one another already and had since sometime before I was born. It was like walking into a history text full of dead white men, except that about half of them seemed to be breathing without life support. (Those were the military officers.) I'm not even going to mention the congressmen and ambassadors and the senator who "dropped in" for 15 minutes.

It might not have been so terrible if these people had the same notion of manners that I do. But this is a group that basically sees me as a young woman (and, trust me, in this crowd, 40 is young and it's not like it helps that people usually think I look younger than I am) and immediately assumes that they can dismiss me as not being of any importance. So at the banquet, I sat and steamed while the man sitting on my right (one of the mere v.p.s) talked for an hour straight to the man on his right (one of the CEOs) about their lawns and the man on my left (military) told the man on his left (v.p.) about his vasectomy. Aside from the impropriety of the latter as a dinner table conversation topic, I'd always thought that it was proper to alternate talking to the people on each side of you every few minutes or so.

I was actually grateful when the dinner speaker started. And I was even more grateful after the banquet when I could escape to my room and watch baseball on TV.

Realistically, I know that some of this was my own shyness and I could probably have made more effort and so on. But I go to professional society events and receptions at contractors and so on all the time and this was definitely a tougher crowd.