This is a perfect place for airing my disappointment in how my last minute session for SQL Saturday #56 came out. And so I shall! (Sorry, I’ve been reading Little Women…)

I chronicled in the #SQL Awesomesauce how I was tapped to teach at the event very shortly beforehand, and then how the session went, more or less. All of that is accurate, but I downplayed my feelings about the session a little bit.  Yes, the session went okay, considering. I was more disorganized than I’d like, but I’m kind of okay with that. And we were fine with the tornado drills. But I blogged that “I feel I really fell short when it came to answering the questions at the end.” In reality, I couldn’t answer a single bloody question, and some of them were pretty basic questions, like “how do you include a subreport?” Um, as it turns out I don’t know that.  Nor any of the other questions.

There’s a feeling you get when a session is going well, and people are laughing and throwing out their own stories, that’s very powerful. It’s exactly like being onstage at the theater and making your audience laugh, or cry.  I suppose the polar opposite of that would include the throwing of rotten vegetables, but the realistic opposite is just Losing Your Audience.  About 45 minutes in, I ran out of material, couldn’t answer questions, and Lost My Audience.

I’m not upset that I gave the session, and I’m not mortally embarrassed at how it went. But it was definitely discomfiting to lose my audience, and I’d like to avoid it if I can. I suspect, however, that each performer’s life will have its fair share of lost audiences and dead air.

Oh well….

-Jen