When does a talk really exist?

I gave my 20 minute contributed talk yesterday. I was somehow placed in a "stochastic modeling" section even though the stuff I presented was entirely deterministic. There were 5 talks in the session and 3 of us remarked that we had no idea why our talks were placed in our session, so maybe it's just the placement of those talks that was stochastic?

With the odd placement of the talk and its conflict with a nonlinear waves session (which is where most people who would want to see my talk were, and also where I would have been were it not for my talk), I had an abundant audience consisting of four people. (2 of the session speakers had already left.) I have given practice talks with over 7 times as many people (granted, that was excellent attendance for a practice talk), so at some level it's hard to treat that as a real talk. (I do know of situations in which the only people in the audience were the speaker and the session chair, but thankfully that's never happened to me.)

The talk before mine was craptacular. In fact, it was impressively "awesome" and may have been the worst talk I've ever seen in terms of delivery style. (I've seen loads of talks whose results I didn't agree with, so I would say they sucked in that sense, but which were given in some sort of logical or semilogical fashion.) The speaker had busy slides, zipped through them instantly, was silent for a long time while he was zipping through them, and never gave any clue as to what his topic was. He also finished in 5 minutes (instead of the 15 minutes + 5 for questions), giving a 15 minute break before I was supposed to start. Words cannot accurately describe how singularly "impressive" this talk was. I'm not sure if it's the worst talk I've ever seen --- technically, the fact that it only lasted 5 minutes automatically prevents it from being worse than lots of other talks, but I'm trying to measure pure quality regardless of how much or little pain it caused me --- but it's definitely a contender. I can't remember a "worse" talk at the moment, though because of the length considerations I mentioned, I can certainly think of tons of more painful ones.

I had to move multiple times while writing this blog entry. I guess I should have just told them I'd be done with this before the coffee break (and the ensuing several hundred people) started.