Organisers will publish speakers' names in the programme before asking them to speak.
Emails breathlessly announcing events will fail to say when or where they are being held.
Organisers will never tell speakers when they need to arrive or depart.
Events will be described as starting on a particular day (implying that speakers need to arrive the day before) when, in fact, registration starts during the late afternoon, this is followed by dinner, and the first actual event only starts at eight that evening and comprises a waffly introductory talk with little useful content, meaning that speakers could have arrived during the day or even the morning after.
Organisers will assume that it takes a few minutes to drive from the venue to the airport during the evening rush-hour, and that it takes under 15 minutes to check-in baggage, clear security and board an intercontinental flight.
As the event approaches, organizers will ask for all sorts of extra deliverables from speakers (aka gold-plating). A talk will start to be referred to as a paper. Interviews, CVs and photographs – not previously requested – will be urgently sought as if they had been asked for months before.
The person meeting you at the airport will be unintentionally standing by an exit exclusively reserved for disembarking Russian aircrew and quarantined livestock, your name will be mis-spelled on the sign he is carrying and will be a swear-word in the local language, and his driving will induce religious experiences.
Organisers will attach ancillary dinners, breakouts, fringes, press-calls, scenic tours and workshops to the conference, some outside the confines of the programme, so that speakers who have already booked their planes will miss them.
Inexplicably, conferences will meet in two or more venues, requiring uncomfortable bus-transport in the middle of the event.
Inaugural speeches by MPs and civic dignitaries will be cancelled, promised TV crews absent.
Speakers from some third world countries will embarrassedly request a personal letter of invitation from the foreign minister and the lodging of a $50,000 bond with their embassy in case they don't go back. Some delegates mysteriously won't have return tickets.
The keynote speaker's visa will have expired the day before his arrival and he will call you from the airport police-station in his underwear.
The conference desk will be manned by an increasingly harassed menopausal woman in a bright orange trouser-suit who throws a tantrum and resigns at a quarter past eleven on the morning of the second day.
Information on the website will be substantially incorrect, and online booking will put a virus on your hard disk.
Speakers will find that they have to tell the hotel three times to bill the price of their stay to conference organizers, and there may be problems with this. Your bill will include a special premium TV channel which you swear you never watched.
Speakers will leave writing their PowerPoints until they're on the plane and then leave the USB key in the taxi on the way to the venue.
The weekly fire-alarm test is always eight-and-a-half minutes into your presentation.
Your mobile bill afterwards will be £2,470.19.
Organisers will change the programme, including the titles of speakers' talks, at whim and sometimes during the conference.
You have to put your room-card in a slot by the door to make the lights work and the key to the minibar will snap in the lock. The trouser-press will inexplicably have someone else's trousers in them.
The headset channel carrying the simultaneous translation from Swedish into Portuguese will actually feature hysterical taxi-broadcasts in Turkish.
The fruit on the speakers' table is made from wax, you discover.