Back to the future (or the day of the crises)

Yesterday was a very interesting day \(-\) not sure if “interesting” is the best word to describe it, but for now I’ll just use it…

We had our workshop on survival analysis in health economic evaluations, which instigated the first crisis of the day: Patricia Guyot, who was supposed to talk about digitising data from published studies, had to bail out \(-\) this is somewhat similar to the Passport incident (except that that was entirely my fault, while this time, Patricia’s train was delayed, which meant she missed her flight from Amsterdam). So, we had to reshuffle the order of the talks and make do with one less \(-\) fortunately, both Nick and Chris had plenty of interesting things to say. In the end, the workshop was very good, I thought and I enjoyed it very much. The slides are available here.

On to the next crisis: when I got back to the office, there was a bunch of emails waiting for me to inform me that we may have a series of potential clashes with speakers not being able to give the talks they are supposed to, at the next ISBA World Meeting, at which our Section is organising a session (I will be talking about the RDD project). I think we managed to solve that crisis too \(-\) luckily we had organised a session with 4 (instead of 3) speakers, so we could just lose one without impacting too much.

On to the next crisis: as I was finally riding my Vespa back home, I moved my phone from my jeans pocket to my jacket pocket. Or so I thought \(-\) evidently it never made it to the jacket pocket and fell on the floor, without me noticing until I got home. So I’ve now been catapulted back to the 1980s with no phone or internet always with me…

For example, I had to go to a meeting in a part of UCL where I’d never been, earlier today. But because I couldn’t rely on a map on my phone, I had to print out a paper copy of all the references (name and phone number of the person I was supposed to meet, address, etc). Even though, spectacularly, I managed to lose the piece of paper with all this info in a matter of minutes (and I can’t figure out how this may have happened!), I did get to the meeting on time.