On the night my side gig would kick off I made sure to log in a few minutes early. I wanted to make sure all was well, and I like a few minutes of chat before the session starts. Unless I'm not ready on time, I always log into my Welsh session a few minutes early as well.
The technology worked. I was in! And I immediately saw that a participant was logging in too. Good! It took a while before she was in, though. But she got there. And soon afterwards I saw a second person logging in. And quite soon Cecilia, one of my contact people, appeared too. But after that, no new faces appeared. The first login counted for two; it was a married couple using one computer. But three in total, that'll still a lot less than I had hoped. Cecilia said she was going to check her email and her phone and what not to see if anyone had got in touch with her, with technical difficulties or something. But after a while she reappeared. She had nothing! What to do? Courses like this have minimum number of participants, and it is higher than three. Should we just call it off? Should we just see what the matter was and try again next week? Should I just do the whole session for only these three? There was some discussion. One of the participants also pointed out that they had been charged for this course, even though online courses so far had always been free. Would that be the problem?
After some discussion we agreed that Cecilia would find out if this was what the problem was, and that we would just try again next week. And for now the three participants wanted to know what I would have said if I would have gone along. I kept it a bit brief; I didn't want to run through the entire two hour session twice. So I focused on the climate bit; in the beginning I have some general introduction but I skipped that. And I skipped some stuff I had bolted on at the end.
It wasn't as I had hoped it would go, but it was nice to have a bit of a climate chat with three interested people. Altogether we were on the call for about an hour. And then we said our goodbyes! I would have another chat about the situation with Cecilia the next day.
I don't know what will happen now! Will we get sufficient numbers next week? I sure hope so! But even if not; the course exists now. And there will be other people interested. Cecilia had already had contact with a group of Quakers who were also interested! I think sooner or later this course will run. But well, I had had a nice hour! And that is worth something too…
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