A Dispatch From the (Surprisingly Interesting) Boring Conference
Arts, entertainment, and more. Nov. 27 2012 11:41 AM
Surprisingly Interesting  A dispatch from the 2012 Boring
Conference.  Bored person at a boring meeting. The most boring
topics in the world can be interesting—if framed in the right
way.    Mark O'Connell Mark O'Connell   When I got to the venue,
the young lady at the welcome table informed me, with an air of
genuine sympathy, that I’d missed some very boring stuff
already. The day had kicked off with conference organizer James
Ward’s keynote on supermarket self-service checkouts, (with an
emphasis on the phenomenon of “unexpected items in the bagging
area”). Then a former postman had given a talk on letterboxes
and the neglected problem of protective bristles, and there had
been a very well-received presentation on discontinued IBM cash
registers. I regretfully agreed that all this did sound
extremely boring and proceeded to the large neo-Georgian
auditorium, where an audience of about 500