As mentioned previously here on the Sparkle On blog, inspired by the business shutdowns during the pandemic, I’ve hosted “Let’s Go Shopping,” an online, accessible, virtual mall crawl featuring small business owners offering their best products to an audience tuned in via the Zoom platform. This year was no exception, as the seventh of these events took place on November 4th and 5th. As is often the case with the best laid plans, lots of work goes into creating an experience that doesn’t always work out the way we hope.
There always seems to be one technical glitch or another when doing just about anything online, and with over a dozen vendors, over 100 attendees, a subscriber list growing with requests to join, even as the event commenced, responding to questions in real time, and acting as the program emcee, I had lots of balls in the air. Something was bound to go awry, and it did. Just as I was about to give my own presentation at the second hour on the second day, my internet service provider experienced an outage, and I was tossed off the Zoom platform, and unable to log back in.
It took about an hour, but eventually, thanks to the solution offered by a tech-savvy vendor who happened to log in to the program right before the outage, I was able to create a personal hotspot, tether my laptop to my phone, and get back into the program. My techie friend was able to hold down the fort, keeping attendees chatting while I was spiraling into an anxiety attack, trying to troubleshoot a problem that I later learned would take hours to resolve. Okay, then. Execute Plan B.
After the shopping event was over, I recorded what would have been my live presentation, and it is linked below. The recording is about an hour long, and if you were disappointed that you missed out on all the new items I planned to share during my “what’s new for holiday 2022” presentation, I hope you enjoy this do-over.
The complete Let’s Go Shopping recordings will be available over the long Thanksgiving weekend, and you’ll be able to listen to both days on my Accessible Insights Blog. If you are subscribed to the LGS groups announcement list, you’ll get a heads-up when the audio is posted.
If, after listening to my audio gift guide here, you have questions about any of the items mentioned, feel free to reach out via our contact form or by phone.
Wishing you and yours a joyful holiday season!
Laura