Ten things I noticed at the 2005 PDC

Date:September 23, 2005 / year-entry #276
Tags:other
Orig Link:https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050923-12/?p=34073
Comments:    13
Summary:Supplementing Sara Ford's PDC trip report: Some of my own stories and observations from the PDC. Tip: If you're designing a hotel, don't put big noisy fountains right next to the check-in desk. Turns out that if you do that, conversation between a guest and the desk staff becomes rather difficult. Eventually, guests get tired...

Supplementing Sara Ford's PDC trip report: Some of my own stories and observations from the PDC.

  1. Tip: If you're designing a hotel, don't put big noisy fountains right next to the check-in desk. Turns out that if you do that, conversation between a guest and the desk staff becomes rather difficult. Eventually, guests get tired of asking the staff to repeat everything they say and just nod politely.

  2. Tip: Go ahead, walk from the hotel to the convention center in the morning. It's good exercise, and goodness knows you need some exercise after all that food you've been eating. And who knows, you might run into a Dane named Mads [fix misspelling, 10am] and end up comparing the Swedish, Danish, and German languages for fifteen minutes, and be reassured by said Dane that Danish pronunciation isn't as difficult it sounds. Hey, it could happen.

  3. Observation: At the hip revolving cocktail lounge at the top of the hotel, there are two types of people. There are the cool people. And there are the nerds who are in town for a technology conference. You, my friend, are one of the nerds. (And you also would have computed that the lounge performs one turn in approximately 75 minutes.)

  4. Tip: When you're waiting for the elevator to arrive, don't peek through the crack in the doors if the elevator is external. You will see the sky and get all creeped out.

  5. Tip: If there is a police officer on a motorcycle waiting at a stoplight, don't jaywalk right in front of him. It turns out he'll notice and write you a ticket. (Actually, he might just let you off with a warning, but why chance it? Drivers in Los Angeles are crazy. He's stopping you for your own safety. Fortunately, I did not have to learn this lesson first-hand.)

  6. Observation: I'm sorry, I don't care how yummy it is. A fountain of chocolate is just plain wrong.

  7. Observation: They say the camera adds ten pounds. What they didn't say is that it also makes your left hand look all withered and deformed. In speaker training, they teach you to keep your hands up, closer to your face. That's why in all the pictures of Bill Gates giving a speech, his hands are at chest level or higher. I tried to keep my hands up, but my left hand tends to droop and turn into one of those claw things.

  8. Observation: Talking with customers for over eleven hours straight really wipes you out. It also gives you a sore throat (and I'm afraid I may have caught something but I'm doing a pretty good job of fighting it off so far).

  9. Bonus typo: At Ask the Experts, one of the sections was titled "Communcation".

  10. Tip: If you're going to go from the PDC straight to the airport, stuff an extra shirt in your day pack so you can change out of your PDC staff shirt and not wear it all the way back to Redmond. Because it turns out that if you wear a staff shirt outside the convention hall, you just look like a nerd. (See item 3.)

I met up with Sara at closing time Friday since we coincidentally had the same flight out. Since the flight wasn't for a few hours, it was nice to have someone to chat with to pass the time. (And yet nobody took her up on her lunch date offer. What, were you scared of her? Really, she's a very nice person.)

Boarding for our flight was announced and we waited our turn on the Jetway®. After a few minutes, an agent wormed her way through the line and headed for the plane. It was then that we realized, "Hey, this line hasn't moved for a long time. I wonder what's going on."

Another few minutes later, a police officer walked down the hall and onto the plane.

Everybody moved to the walls, clearing a path down the center. Because when a police officer gets on the plane, you know he's coming back off one way or another, and it's not going to be pretty. (It's not like the flight crew ask for a police officer because they would like him to sing a song.)

Some time later, a second police officer got on the plane. And then two more airport employees. Everybody waiting in line was trying to guess what was going on.

Eventually, a middle-aged gentleman walked calmly off the plane, followed by the two police officers and the airport employees. As the last of the airport employees went past, someone in the line asked, "What happened?"

The airport employee didn't break stride and just said, "Idiot."

As we got on board, everybody was trying to figure out what happened. I was seated next to two gentlemen who didn't know either; the disruption was at the back of the plane. Sara did a pretty good job of fact-finding and the story (fourth-hand by now) was that the gentleman had a ticket for a later flight but tried to muscle his way into a seat and became rather unpleasant when the flight crew asked him to leave. When the police showed up, he immediately backed down, realizing that the jig was up, and went quietly.

There were, of course, no seats available on any earlier flights. Los Angeles to Seattle the afternoon after the Microsoft PDC, tickets are going to be scarce. Probably half the people on the flight were Microsoft staff returning home. This gentleman's effort to get home two hours earlier made an entire planeful of people late by ten minutes. And I suspect he's going to have a hard time buying a ticket from that airline for a while...

Comments (13)
  1. James Risto says:
    September 23, 2005 at 10:32 am

    Thanks, your article made me laugh out loud, and I happened to be on the phone with PSS at the time! Thanks!

  2. David Li says:
    September 23, 2005 at 10:35 am

    awesome article

  3. DeepICE says:
    September 23, 2005 at 10:35 am

    How did he get on the plane in the first place?

  4. BTX says:
    September 23, 2005 at 11:15 am

    he was in the plane already, coming from somewhere else…

  5. JP says:
    September 23, 2005 at 12:20 pm

    Was the PDC Dane named Mats or Mads (silent ‘d’)? Maybe not the same Dane I met at the PDC.

  6. Mike Dunn says:
    September 23, 2005 at 12:25 pm

    I wasn’t scared of Sara, but she didn’t give enough advance notice of her availability. When I’m up from 6am-midnight I don’t feel like going through blogs when I get home. That could be tip #11: Blog readership will go way down during the PDC; announce things the week before, if at all possible.

  7. Sathyaish Chakravarthy says:
    September 23, 2005 at 11:40 pm

    Off Topic: Watched your PDC presentation video on Channel 9. Liked it very much. Look forward to more of your videos on Channel 9. Thanks.

  8. Stephen Jones says:
    September 24, 2005 at 5:00 am

    If the cop is stopped in front of a RED light how the heck are you jay-walking?

    Do they revolve the cocktail lounge faster near closing time so you think you’ve already had too much to drink?

  9. saraford says:
    September 25, 2005 at 1:10 am

    Sorry about that Mike. I didn’t finalize my PDC schedule until the thursday or friday before PDC (hurricane drama distracted me). Usually, I’m better at these things.

    However, i have posted where i’ll be at the MVP summit. Definitely Thursday night at the product group fair, and potentially Friday at a lunch reception (not sure where off the top of my head). Feel free to contact me if you (or anyone reading this) want to try to sync up at those times or another time.

  10. James Kilner says:
    September 25, 2005 at 12:49 pm

    When you have hands that can play running 10ths you probably don’t need to worry about them looking withered. They may look like the hands of the BFG if you are not careful!

  11. Zman says:
    September 26, 2005 at 2:06 pm

    Darn it I was on the plane with Raymond *and* Sara and didn’t recognize either of them….

    Anyway, I was sitting right behind ‘the incident’ so here’s the full scoop.

    When I boarded there was a guy standing just behind my seat (G1) which seemed odd since the plane was only 1/4 full. After I sat down the hostess (AH) came and fetched him back to the seat in front of me which was already occupied by G2.

    AH "Sir, I’ve confirmed the seat does belong to this gentleman, if you would come with me we can find out what is wrong".

    G2 "I confirmed this seat at 8:30 this morning and I’ve been waiting since then to get to Seattle – when did you get the seat"

    G1 "2 hours ago when I checked in"

    G2 "So this is mine, I’m not moving becuase I know this flight and the one after is full. I"m not getting off the plane unless he does too"

    G1 "OK"

    AH "No sir, you need to get off the plane"

    G2 "Call your suprevisor"

    So we wait 5 minutes for the supervisor (SU).

    Repeat the above conversation and add…

    SU "Sir, I have to ask you again to leave the plane, otherwise I will call the police"

    G2 "Why would I give up a seat when I know I’m not going to get another?"

    SU "Because the plane is not leaving until you do"

    G2 "Call the police"

    At this point I realised that nobody else had got on the plane for 5 minutes and I’m wondering what this idiot thinks he is going to achieve. Its pretty obvious they are not going to let him have the seat.

    G1 "This will get bad you know"

    G2 "Its my seat, I have a right to it, blah blah blah"

    G1 "Sorry, I was just trying to stop you from getting arrested"

    Then the policeman gets on and walks towards us. I feel the passengers around us tesning up for some sort of confrontation but as he gets close G2 gets up, grabs his bag and walks off the plane. He knew he was going to lose, he was just being an obnoxious git.

    I talked to G1 – seems that G2 had indeed checked in at 8:30am but he had been trying to fly standby all day. Apparantly if you go on a standby list they cancel your actual seat. Of course all the flights that day to Seattle were full so he waited until his actual flight and then used the boarding pass that was now invalid. G1 said that he would have let the guy have his seat but he had to leave for a cruise early the following morning.

  12. Dustin Fraze says:
    September 29, 2005 at 10:05 am

    Very interesting read.

    Regarding point 7, I’d like to know more about the speaker training. Did they offer insite as to why you are to keep your hands close to your face? I’d heard you should do so with notecards, but haven’t heard of it with nothing in your hands…

  13. Andrew Molyneux says:
    October 3, 2005 at 6:45 am

    I thought number 6 was pretty funny.

    I was at PowerPoint Live in San Diego last week, and noticed the chocolate fountain there (Doubletree Mission Valley). I commented on it to one of my colleagues at the time (along the lines of "what the heck is that even *for*?").

    Maybe the chocolate fountains are taking over…

Comments are closed.


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