Advice

(My remarkable evening continued.)

Time flied. I regained consciousness one-and-a-half hour later.

“So, what do you think?” The verbose man finished – at last.

“I suppose I am supposed not to think?” I said to myself. But, instead, I put up a friendly smile and said, “I could not agree with point one of your conclusion…”

“Oh, how could that be?” My new acquaintance was obviously surprised, “Don’t you agree with the animal data that I showed – which are all very convincing?”

“Em… What you showed was your new drug is not toxic to the kidney. It really doesn’t prove that the drug protects the kidney.” I pointed out.

He paused for a moment before saying, “Doesn’t our human experiment also show the same result?” I refrained to comment any further, but, instead, gave him my favorite response of Dr. James Sheppard (in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), “I must be off home. Thank you for a most interesting and instructive evening.”

“Oh, no. Not yet. Just a moment more,” my Hercule Poirot said, “We have to go through your slides as well.”

I began to wonder why Dr. Sheppard did not try to silence the great detective once and for all.

“Eh… I suppose I know them very well?” I hesitated to suggest.

“No, not now. I made some new slides for you.” He said.

I must say the remarkable director was right – I could not recognize my own slides when they were shown to me. He had not only added a few new slides (if 20 slides for a 30-minute talk are a few), he also changed the sequence of my old slides, choose a new slide layout, and used a different font for the text.

And, as you expect, he certainly showed me how he expected me to present – or what I should say in the presentation.

I believe my memory was very bad and he had probably told me when we greeted each other two hours ago that he came from Russia and he was a former KGB officer.

“Don’t put words into my mouth – not to say idea into my head,” I left by playing Mary Debenham of The Murder on the Orient Express.

My Hercule Poirot was stunned.

PS. I encountered this little incident before my friend VW described in his blog AL's story (see http://vwswong.blogspot.com/2011/12/invitation.html). It is really an honor to be compared to the Queen of Hepatitis.