It all seemed so simple when I offered to run a webinar about webinars for my local society of editors. We set a date, I signed up to a platform (ClickMeeting), the society found the participants, and I planned the session and practised it numerous times. Accompanying me at each practice session was my alter ego, Jane Fonda. I would set Jane up as a dummy participant, on a spare laptop, so that I could easily see what the participants were seeing onscreen. I got into this habit when I was working with a colleague to learn the webinar software. She’d have Jake, her dog, as her participant and I’d have Jane (and sometimes the two would end up talking to one another!).
On the day, I got everything ready well ahead of time and invited Jane. That’s where it all went wrong. She couldn’t get into the webinar, despite multiple invitations. I’ve encountered many problems in running webinars, but this was a new one. Hence, with 5 minutes to the starting time and no attendees signed in (I think the invitation wasn’t working for them either), I had to create a new webinar, find the list of email addresses for the participants, send the invitations and launch the session. Amazingly, only two minutes later, we were up and running, but I’d had no time to sign in as Jane, so had to carry on without her. I missed her — particularly when I got to the last slide on my PowerPoint and my screen was black — I had no way of knowing that the participants could actually see it perfectly well (they told me later). Next time I’ll try inviting Clint Eastwood instead, perhaps I’ll have better luck with him …