Happy Monday, Savages.
I was pretty inactive in the WR last week because I was working a conference. Wanted to relay an insane experience I had and get your feedback on how you would have handled it.
Relatively small conference with only 8 sponsors, 6 of which are direct competitors. Everyone was very cordial/conversational in the vendor hall during downtime except for one person in particular. She works for a company that's been in our state for 20 years. We've only been around for 7 and have been steadily eating their lunch all across the state (we've taken over 100 of their clients and are constantly winning out over them).
She never once introduced herself to me and was constantly side eyeing me whenever she walked past my booth. I didn't think much of it until the incident I'm about to tell you about.
I was leading a session on a subject that we have a lot of expertise in. Had around 25 people sitting in (about a quarter of the conference attendees). Things were going really well, had a lot of interaction from the audience and people were constantly taking pictures of my slides and asking questions. With about 10 minutes left in my presentation, I notice some of the hotel staff waiting outside the door with bar carts and tables/chairs. The room I was in was going to be used for a different vendor's sponsored networking happy hour.
I'm continuing my session with this in mind. The president of the organization putting on the conference is present at the session, so I know if I need to call curtains she'll let me know. All of a sudden, the aforementioned employee of our competitor who has been cold the entire time waltzes in and starts approaching me at the podium telling me I'm over time and need to end the session immediately (blatantly interrupting my presentation). I just acknowledge her briefly and continue with my slides and she stands there in the middle of the room for a few moments and then rolls her eyes and leaves. Mind you, she doesn't even work for the competitor that's hosting the happy hour!
I approach the org president and apologize for going over time and she tells me "No no no, you're totally fine. You didn't go over." I'm still just totally blown away by this and it's been three days. This person took it upon herself to come in and be as rude as possible when the hotel staff themselves weren't in a rush to get me out.
tl;dr: Competitor interrupted my session during a conference to tell me I was overtime when neither the president of the conference org nor the hotel staff were concerned.
How would you handle this?
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