On the return leg from our customer advisory council meeting in Barcelona, I was seated next to someone who looked vaguely familiar. I recognized her but couldn't place her. She was exceptionally conversant (in English with me, in French with the flight attendants, in Czech on her cell phone), and our dialogue touched on existentialism (she was reading the Czech equivalent of Sartre), dealing with in-flight turbulence, ice hockey, family balance, learning Slavic languages, and life in and around the Big Apple.
After putting together some pieces of the puzzle I decided to capture my first thoughts for later blogging, and popped open my OpenSolaris (build 25) laptop. Had to show it off; demonstrated to my seatmate that it looked familiar (she professed to prefer the Windows user experience to a Mac), had office and email and web software, and it was fast. She's (rightfully) proud of her work (I inferred), and I'm proud of Sun's. I just carry my geekly portfolio with me.
Never once did my seatmate give me the "you should know who I am" look, or imply my relative cultural cluelessness for not recognizing her. On the one-year anniversary of ending up in a wheelchair due to a hockey injury, I was once again reminded that we should dismiss all pre-conceived notions about people based solely on the context in which they are first perceived.
It took me two Googles (a new metric for cultural status - props for that, please) to triangulate my seatmate's identity from the clues she politely pushed on the conversational stack. I am probably the first person to ever sit next to Veronika Varekova and recognize her husband (Phoenix Coyote Petr Nedved) first.
I'm not sure I would have had your self-control ;^)
Posted by Robin Wilton on November 11, 2005 at 01:08 PM EST #