LITS, That's so true .... except at my last convention I turned the tables on them. One guy was intensely interested in whether I'd been there on ALL THREE DAYS and said there had been a rumour that we'd only turned up on Sunday. I told him, "Go ahead, ask me a question." But he couldn't think of anything to ask because he, like 99 per cent of all the braindeads there, had been paying no attention and was there only because it was important that he be SEEN to be there.
I had been very interested in a "new thought" that from the first day was promoted as being one of the "exciting" things we should be listening out for. When it came (in a talk on the final day) it turned out to be that the new system might be ... wait for it ... even BETTER than we had ever imagined. What a crock. That was the "new thought".
So I said to this guy, "So Steve, what did you think of the 'new thought'?" He looked blank. "You didn't hear it?" I asked. So I repeated the "new thought".
Then he asked, "What was the highlight for you?"
I said to him, straight faced, "The closing song."
I left soon the arena soon after, as angry as I always was at the end of a time-wasting, self-congratulating three-day indoctrination session, furious that my weekend had just disappeared and I was back to work the next day.
What else did I hate?
*The competition by elders to make their prayers the longest of the session, particularly at the end of the day when they would "review" the convention, talk by talk.
*The audience's urge to applaud the lamest things (A new release? A new assembly hall despite police opposition in Uzbekistan? The completion of another wing at Bethel? A new peak in attendance at the Turkish-language convention in Sydney?)
*The belittling of anything to do with "the world" by COs and DOs who live in a bubble, their introspective lifestyle funded by people who DO work in the world and need it to eat and put a roof over their heads. (Television? Hair styles? Fashion styles? Higher education? Music? Movies? Driving behavior?)
*The obsession with getting volunteers to clean, clean, clean. I was stupid enough to volunteer one year and found myself spraying windex on handrails and door knobs every 20 minutes. In the toilets I heard some old fart berating a teenage boy because he wasn't cleaning the urinals well enough.
*The embarrassment of sitting through all this crap with paid arena staff standing inaside the auditorium hearing it all too. I'm cringing and thinking, why does this dickhead on the stage have to labour this stuff?
*And yeah, like 3Mozzies, the walk to and from the convention venue with suit and briefcase, trying to pretend people (including sneering footy fans) didn't think I was one of the other thousand morons going there.
Agony. Every convention. God I'm glad to be out of it.
