Murthy's law

I recently presented at the tech ed India conference along with a team mate.
We have the last session before the closing keynote on the last day of the conference - not a very good idea if this is the first time you are presenting in such a big event because you have this in the back of your head in everything you do till the very last day.... and for several other reasons.
But that is not what this post is about.
This is about what happened when the session actually happened.
The conference is happening in Lalit Ashok - a hotel in Bangalore. They have several convention halls spread across different buildings and you have to do some amount of walking to get from one session to another if the session you want to attend was in a track that is running in a different hall.
About 30 minutes before our session is to begin, we set up my laptop with all the relevant documents/presentations/Web page that we are going to use during the presentation in the correct order and put the machine to sleep. With about 15 minutes to go, we walk over to the hall where we are going to present from the hotel lobby - and it is just as well because as soon as we reach the Kalinga hall, it starts raining heavily. You don't want to show up on stage completely drenched.
The session before us is related to new features in bing maps and a good sized crowd is attending it. This crowd becomes captive audience for us in the next session because by the time the bing maps session is over, the rain has turned into a furious downpour.
All good so far. The previous speaker thanks the audience and wraps up her stuff about 10 minutes later than she should have - eating into the 15 minute break during which we are supposed to come up to stage and set our equipment up.
We walk up to the stage and put my laptop on the desk there. Before I know, someone plugs in the cable for the projector into the video out port. I open the laptop lid and try waking it up.
Nothing happens ....
...a few seconds and tries later, nothing continues to happen. The laptop does not wake up or respond -- I am guessing because it is confused with the addition of the new video during its sleep or whatever.
I take what will be the first of my many deep breaths on the stage then, turn over the machine and fiddle with the battery to somehow try and pull it out. This is a brand new machine and I don't really know the exact battery locking mechanism. It is simple enough though and I pull the battery out and put it back in hoping that would have hard booted the machine.
The machine does switch on then. We re-open all of the documents and windows we need for the session.
The rain is sounding like a heavy road roller on the roof of the hall and I can hear nothing of my screen reader from the laptop's tiny speakers. For some reason, we have anticipated bad acoustics and I have borrowed my team mate's really nice earphones just before walking in here. I plug that in and put one of the earpieces into my right ear. The left ear has some kind of a mike that we are made to wear for the session.

At this point a really professional sounding lady walks up to me and says: "just in case your laptop develops a problem again, let us take a backup of all your presentation materials so that our session is not interrupted"... click...
The click sound is that of her pen drive sliding professionally into the USB port on the right of my laptop without warning and without telling me first. her thought is noble but her pen drive is not so - it is loaded with several viruses/worms/whatever that the anti virus on my machine doesn't really like. There is an explosion of anti virus warning windows on the screen. My trust worthy protector fights away the worms and delays the start of my session still more with everything being projected on the various large screens in the hall.
At this point, let me explain the layout of the hall a bit. This is the main keynote hall and has a really large screen right behind us on the stage. in addition, there are 3 large screens in about the middle of the hall. 2 of those screens would mirror what is being displayed behind me and the 3rd one in the middle has the close up of the speaker being projected on it for the benefit of those towards the rear of the hall.
On this middle large screen, my usually normal looking face is being projected with a large red scar above my right lip. I have somehow managed to get a sun burn in Bangalore just the previous day and it has turned into crimson red and swollen by this time and now is peing projected in extra large on the middle screen.
Coming back to the presentation, I somehow basify my anti virus, throw out the pen drive and start the session introducing the 2 of us. I get to the agenda slide and after some talking on the first slide, start to bring up my first demo for the session.
My friend puts a hand on my elbow and whispers to stop at that point. I am in the flow of the presentation and don't really grasp what she is whispering. I give her a confused look and am about to continue when she repeats what she just did. At this point it is clear to me that something is wrong but I am still clueless as to what could be wrong. I stop speaking assuming she will say something and clarify to the audience what the matter is.
At this point another professional sounding lady walks up to us and says: "i haven't switched off the screens, it is raining so heavily that water has gone into the circuits. There is nothing I can do. You should probably do Q&A while we figure out what is wrong."
It now dawns on me that all the large screens I just described above have gone blank and dark. It is raining cats and dogs outside and the make shift electrical wiring set up for the event has given way somewhere.
My team mate and I look at each other and then at the professional sounding lady. So far in the presentation, the only thing we've done is introduced the 2 of us and the topic. What exactly does she mean by "Do Q&A" now?
Another deep breath - i turn around towards the audience and start describing the problem. My mind races ahead thinking of a reasonable filler for this point - and brilliantly comes up with nothing.
Fortunately, there are a couple of people in the audience who have some incling of the topic and ask a couple of interesting and intelligent questions. Some time is killed answering - and the rest is killed with silence.
Someone in the crowd realizes that the 3 large screens in the middle of the hall have come back to life. Excellent...
...I announce that fact and someone else with a mike announces that people may want to move to the back of the hall for the rest of the proceedings. A few people reluctantly get up. And suddenly, the screen behind me also comes back.
Everyone settles down and I start again. I am demoing something in Visual studio when my friend touches me on the elbow again...."not again" I say to myself. Apparently the screen behind me is switched on but is displaying the contents from some other hall and not what I am typing.
The professional sounding lady comes back again and says definitively this time: "I think you should wrap it up with a Q&A."
My friend is prepared this time and tells her clearly there is nothing to Q&A here. if it is not going to work, we are wrapping it up. Harish Ranganathan walks up to us, picks up the mike and is about to announce that we'll have to curtail the session.
The screen behind me corrects itself somehow and Harish changes his statement at run time and announces that everything is alright now and we'll go on with the session.
In the mean time, with the video out from the laptop on and off, my screen reader, (which is already pretty jittery being used with Windows 7 and VS 2010 RC for the first time) starts having second thoughts about talking.
I get only intermittent audio feedback from what I am typing. a few letters and then silence. I have practiced what I need to demo and type away into ether hoping I am typing in the right location and without making any mistakes in my code while also talking about the salient points of the supposedly smart code I am writing.
I do make a typing error though and my program doesn't compile. There is no speech from my screen reader. If the program doesn't run, the whole point of the demo won't be made. My friend clicks on the error message with the mouse and the screen reader kicks back in magically. I am able to get to the small mis-typing and the program runs.
I am supposed to talk through the next slide as well and do a small demo with excel as well. But I've almost lost it by now. I sort of introduce the slide and prematurely hand it over to my friend - who through it all still has a cool head on her shoulders. She doesn't miss a beat and does the excel demo as well.
It is now time to present the crux of the session. The silverlight application we've been developing for this session for the last month or so. We have set that up as the default page in the browser. My friend launches the browser. The anti virus page comes up instead.
Apparently, when there is a virus attack successfully repelled by the anti virus, the anti virus also changes the browser default page to a page showing more help about that virus etc. Under our breath, we curse the developer of the anti virus company who created this feature and my friend manually types in the URL of our demo app.
The demo app comes up and my friend does an amazing job with the rest of the demo. There is even an applause from the audience at some cool features of our app.
We finally wrap it up with very little time for the "Q&A" that the professional sounding lady so badly wanted us to do. We answer a couple of more questions and hand it over to Harish Ranganathan who announces the session closed.

My friend at this point says to me: "usually it is Murphy's law. In Bangalore, it seems it is called Murthy's law"