One of the worst mistakes any IT manager or director can make is to attend an IT conference. You think you've got your IT strategy all sewn up. You think you've got your priorities identified and you're just getting on with those. Hell, you've even convinced your finance director to open up the coffers and put something on the balance sheet for the first time in several years. And then you go and spoil it all.

How? Let me explain. Doug, our professional IT conference attendee, has started acting very strange. We caught him drinking bottled water the other day. His suits look to have been washed and the telltale trail of three-day-old carrots down the front of his shirt and tie just isn't there.

By all accounts, he looks to have, heaven help us, stopped drinking. That's not all, however. Not only has he stopped drinking, he's remembered he's a former corporate dealmaker and, even worse, has discovered that there is actually some corporate work around these days. We've not so much lost a friend but, er, gained a corporate partner. Life is truly cruel sometimes.

That leaves me having to attend IT conferences. I've not been for a while and I'm starting to feel like a rookie. Now, the problem with IT conferences is that you need to decide what sort of person you're going to be at the conference. If you're a northern IT director, you're going to be loud, generally quite rude and hate the notion of spending any money.

If you're a City IT director, you're going to want to loudly pretend that you like spending money, even if you've not seen any of the green stuff for years. National firm IT directors usually sit there smugly, having an army of IT staff all doing exactly the same stuff that smaller IT departments do. And magic circle IT directors usually sit there just as smugly, while their IT department figures out whether they'll ever be able to do what small IT departments do.

Firms from outside the top 30 usually aren't allowed to ask questions, which is why they just resort to breaking wind.

Ok, having worked out what sort of director you're going to be, you need to, shock horror, listen to someone else speaking for a considerable period of time. A real challenge for most IT directors and especially myself.

It takes practice, but four inches of duct tape applied across the mouth can work wonders. No, your mouth, not the person speaking. The key word is 'listen', remember.

And that's where it all goes wrong. I hear the top issues for law firms at the moment are e-mail management, disaster recovery (and business continuity, which I understand to mean keeping lunches going while the building burns) and IT compliance.

E-mail management isn't what it used to be. Back in the good old days we shot anyone who sent a personal e-mail, got their grammar wrong or e-mailed more than three people. Nowadays you need huge vaults to manage your e-mails. Hey, we just delete anything over three months old. Much more cost effective. Yet another benefit of becoming a limited liability law firm and having no professional indemnity insurance.

If you were a client and saw our overdraft, you'd never dream of suing us thinking we could cough up. Then again, nor would you give us any work in the first place.

IT compliance too just seems so complex. Data protection, e-business legislation, software licensing. These things all seem to suck in resources for no real financial benefit to the firm. Another area where our lovely limited liability status surely protects us.

I recall one IT director getting quite concerned about this, but that was before they actually jailed him. He is coping though. A few inmates had tried dropping the soap in the shower a few times, but, since he's a former software developer, they soon spotted he didn't actually wash.

No, worst of all for us was disaster recovery. Hearing that other firms had actually created plans and were testing them was something of a revelation to me. I came back to the office suitably enthused, wanting to match them.

Within weeks we had a fully drafted plan, ready for testing. We even hired a government military agency, specialising in rehearsals. Which seemed a really good idea. Except that the military's definition of a rehearsal is a tad different to the civilian world's.

I should have first spotted that something was amiss when I took the call on a Sunday evening regarding a large tanker having crashed into the building, exploding spectacularly. Noone was killed, but watching a jovial bunch of firefighters flood the building was enlightening. We'd just about managed to squeeze several hundred people into one small wing of the office when the water failed, forcing hygiene to new lows. Sweaty Johnson hospitalised three trainees all on his own.

One week later, just as we're getting on top of the situation several tanks drive into reception, a crack troop of SAS soldiers simulate hostage taking and 300 marines storm the building. Try telling an SAS soldier that this is supposed to be an exercise; three cracked ribs have taught me otherwise.

So, did we learn anything from this? Yes. Never go to IT conferences. And thanks to the SAS taking him hostage, Doug's had another nervous breakdown and is back on the bottle.

He was so, so glad to get his old IT job back.