1. People visiting your university for a conference shouldn’t have to read a campus map and a map of the town just to figure out where things are. How much would it have cost to put up strategic signs to tell people how to walk from the hotel to the lecture hall to the poster room, instead of having streams of semi-confused attendees traipsing randomly all over campus? Half the attendees didn’t realize that there were two rooms until both poster sessions were over.
  2. People shouldn’t have to be led on a ten-minute walk away from the conference hall just for the coffee break. Especially at 9:45 on a Sunday morning, and especially when 300 people braved the rain only to discover that campus catering forgot the order.
  3. Three hundred hungry conference delegates shouldn’t have to serve themselves dorm food from just one serving line for every meal. And when most of them are graduate students, “Well, if the lines are too long, there’re plenty of restaurants downtown!” is not an acceptable alternative.
  4. The conference schedule shouldn’t have the wrong time printed on it for the conference banquet. Also, it is ridiculous to expect students to have to pay $5 for a soda and $6 for bottled water at the reception, no matter how high-class the venue is. Seriously.
  5. Conference delegates shouldn’t be expected to make their way to the banquet dinner location on their own by public transport in a city that is foreign to 85% of them. The venue really didn’t need to be an hour away, either.
  6. Attendees who drove to the conference shouldn’t have been issued the wrong kind of parking permit, causing half of them all get parking tickets and have to be all trouped down to campus police to get it all sorted out.
  7. Attendees who have vehicles shoudn’t have to discover on the last day of the conference that campus construction had cordoned off one third of the assigned parking garage for drilling, causing the hapless vehicles behind the flagged line to be towed away and forcing the other cars to drive over concrete debris and power cords. “Your hosts should have told you”, said the tow truck driver. No kidding.
  8. People presenting posters shouldn’t have been told to expect to give a poster of a specific size, only to discover that the boards actually provided were too narrow and too tall. Flimsy cardboard that was obviously requisitioned for this temporary purpose, with insufficient pins or other mounting material provided, and having to actually dismount the poster board just to tack their oversized posters on them makes for a rather class act.
  9. In this day and age, it should be reasonable to expect wireless Internet access at the conference sites. People shouldn’t have to have to walk to the nearby Burger King just to use the free wifi hotspot there.