I was approached to do a presentation for a national conference and partly because of the personal relationship with the chair, I accepted. I worked up a short abstract because the conference is a few months off, I have a couple of committees that are taking up more time than I expected, and I had to dig up the data on the subject, which would dictate what I would say exactly. That was not sufficient, so I wrote another .... which was not sufficient. The chair then combined the two previous versions and that was not sufficient as they wanted a "fuller" abstract for the printers. So here I am squeezing work in on the final and improved version of the abstract when I get an email. There is some confusion on an earlier presentation. A search had found I was not the primary author any longer. A former employee, who had minimal data input for the basis, but which had been listed as the third and last author had posted in several places where he was now the primary author and I was secondary. I know this person had been bouncing around in their career, but it was partly due to thing like this. I had just given a good reference for them a few months ago and now I question whether I should have or will do so again.
The original paper was on page 666 of the publication, which made the author index rather amusing ......
I am still pondering what I should do while trying to flesh out the next abstract.
