Our new offices were on the fifteenth floor of a London skyscraper. I was pretty pleased with how my old belongings fitted into my new space until RK invited me into his new room – or, should we say, “suite”. His boss had given him a free hand to appoint a team of interior designers and builders, as well as funding for new furniture and fittings. Now my new office looked really shoddy in comparison.

Further up the building TM and I discovered the conference centre, managed by my school friend ECM. She enforced strict security measures. Before you could go through to the lecture halls you had to empty the contents of your handbag into a bin, and then the bag itself. I begged to be allowed back to my room where I would dispose of my belongings and – more importantly – get to keep my handbag. Most reluctantly, ECM sneaked me and TM past the security guard over to the lift and we set off on our journey back to the fifteenth floor. Unfortunately, by this time neither of us could remember the route. We caused huge embarrassment when we stumbled through a black curtain directly onto the stage where a woman was in the middle of a conference presentation on mobile communications: MO was there and she laughed. Then we mistook a tube carriage for the lift. We only realised our error when the train pulled into Redhill station.

In the middle of all this I pondered the role of Twitter at conferences. If you weren’t permitted to take your belongings into sessions in the conference centre (including laptops and mobile phones), how on earth could the conference facility claim that it supported amplified events?