While everyone in the consumer tech industry hauled themselves, their dogs and their dogs’ fleas over to MWC in Barcelona this week, I actually ended up in Valencia. Only an hour up the road from old Bartha, Panasonicwas holding its now-annual HD Networking Conference.

It’s a bit of a fancy name really for what was essentially a standard-fare European launch week, where most of the Panasonic gear that was launched at CES, was exhibited and confirmed for Europe in 2008.

Panasonic, it seems, has fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course. So this was a good chance to have a look at all the company’s products in one place.

Panasonic has fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course

The week started off pretty well. I got to Gatwick airport on Monday afternoon, ready for our glamorous EasyJet flight over to the south of Spain. I met up with Panasonic’s PR team, a bunch of other tech journalists (the competition) and everything was pretty relaxed.

Apart from the grossly, morbidly, shockingly obese American man who held everyone up at check-in, the senile old lady who collapsed while passing through security and the sub-machinegun-clad police officers who looked like they’d shoot us in the face as soon as look at us, we experienced no hold-ups and were in Spain in no time at all.

The irony was, that on a trip where I was supposed to go and see a load of cool new technologies, it was actually the technology that caused the biggest faux-pas of the whole week.

The schedule was hectic, but I made it to Wednesday morning without too much trouble. Little did I know that Windows XP was about to mess it all up.

As soon as I had landed in Spain I changed the time on my phone, and when I turned my laptop on, I changed the time on that too. Spain is an hour ahead of the UK so I wanted to make sure I didn’t get caught out.

On Wednesday morning, we were supposed to meet in the lobby of our hotel at 9.30. So when it got to 9am, I thought I had better get dressed, get packed and get downstairs – plenty of time. At that second, I got a call. It was Claire from Panasonic asking me where I was.

It turned out that it wasn’t 9am at all – it was 10am. And while I was sitting in bed watching Hillary Clinton getting creamed by Barack Obama on CNN, everyone else was already sitting on the coach outside ready to go sightseeing.

So what had happened? Annoyingly, when I changed the time on my laptop, I didn’t change the time zone. So when I turned it off and on again the time reset back to GMT time. And then when I plugged in my phone to charge via USB on Tuesday night, the laptop altered the time on my phone too. Which meant my alarm went off an hour late without me even noticing.

I threw some clothes on, stuffed everything into my suitcase and got myself downstairs in record time. Getting on the coach was incredibly embarrassing though, and the expected cheers, jeers and mocking claps rang out as soon as I poked my head through the door. Very humiliating.

Of course, no one would believe my excuse about Windows XP conspiring to change all my clocks to the wrong time. So the ribbing continued all day long.

So what did I learn from this Panasonic trip? I discovered that the company has some really cool new kit coming out in the coming year. Much of it is very nice indeed. And I also learned that when crossing time zones, it’s very important to change the time zone in Windows XP, not just the time!