I have been the main organizer for 4ICC currently being held in Auckland. This is my first job of organizing a meeting of this type. I started 14 months ago and the last few months have been extremely busy. Before doing this I had an idea of the main tasks: finding invited speakers, booking rooms, budgeting, etc. All these are quite onerous, but predictably so, and I did get help with some of them. What surprised me was this kind of stuff (which will no longer surprise me if I ever forget myself enough to do it again): at the first coffee break on Monday morning, participants used the souvenir coffee mugs in their conference bags, instead of the cups supplied, so the coffee ran out halfway through; the travel agent I was forced to use made 4 errors with booking invited speaker accommodation, so that speakers emailed me late on Sunday night worried about where they were going to spend Friday night; having to give the same information over and over again to people who could have read it on the conference website; worrying about losing people on the excursion; catching a cold and having no time to rest; in other words, being ultimately responsible for everything! Overall, the last two weeks had more stress than the preceding 12 months, and I am filled with admiration for people who do this for a living.

The conference itself seemed to go well overall. Thanks to all who helped with the organization – I could not have done it without you. And no thanks to that travel agent.