2

The airline forced me to check my poster and now it's gone lost. The session I was supposed to participate in is today, so there's little chance of finding a printer in town in a few hours; What do I do?


In Germany, no businesses may operate on Sunday except with explicit exemptions, and a German printer would rather go out of business than work on a Sunday anyway. Also, this is a small town in the middle of nowhere; when I write "little chance" I really mean "no chance".

15
  • 3
    I wish you had read the question Flying with a poster tube as a hand luggage before your flight.
    – Nobody
    Aug 13, 2017 at 9:39
  • 10
    Have you tried contacting the conference organizers and explaining your situation to them? At the very least it's probable they have access to a printer.
    – lukeg
    Aug 13, 2017 at 10:28
  • 1
    The first thing to do would indeed be to contact the conference organizers. They typically have local people who will know if there is any suitable printing service around, if you are lucky they might even have planned for this kind of situation (it's not so uncommon). If not, assuming that the poster accompanies a paper in the proceedings a backup plan would be to just print the paper in standard A4 sheets in any standard printer you can find, and display them on the poster board. It's better than nothing. Aug 13, 2017 at 11:13
  • 1
    "there's little chance of finding a printer in town in a few hours" - In a major city? I could see some difficulty at a resort town or something, but otherwise there are print shops all over, and they don't usually need much notice to print a poster.
    – Bryan Krause
    Aug 13, 2017 at 23:18
  • 1
    @Bryan Krause this is not a major city and is in Germany on a Sunday, where nothing is open at all, so, yes, my statement is very true. Aug 14, 2017 at 5:54

2 Answers 2

2

Unfortunately my answer comes too late for the OP specifically.

First, you should contact the session organizers to explain your situation. This is important because you do not want to be regarded as a no-show by the organizers. Depending on the conference, it may have a negative impact being able to present at the same conference in the future.

Second, you would want to avoid wasting your opportunity to present at a poster session. As others have suggested, try to print a full size or even a partial size poster, or even just your major figures. Ultimately the point is for attendees to see your research, results, affiliation and to network, and any kind of information is better than no information. As long as its enough for someone to come up and talk to you, I'm sure you can fill out the rest of the details by your memory.

1

Try to contact the conference organizers and explain your situation to them. At the very least it's probable they have access to a printer.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .