She did, it got solved in a couple hours, once I was able to nail down the exact problem. It's hard when random attendees are only able to give reports of "it's not working", when it's something tricky like this. I think it took the better part of a day to nail the problem down, maybe longer (my memory is spotty on it).
Companies should work out a way to incentivise low-level workers to escalate and chase up "difficult to tackle" issues. Ignoring problems rarely work long-term and it's companies best interest to know and solve issues.
And indeed, would have probably thought that people at a conference would be better being human beings and talking to each other, rather than staring into a laptop screen.
This was the conference where Ka-Ping Ye could be found huddling in the back of the room, and then a few hours later give a presentation on "look what I just did". So, I hear what you're saying, but there is also value in being on your computer in that environment.
Except that our contract with the venue included that they would provide Internet access, so we were collecting these problem reports and in several cases money was withheld due to poor performance.