Disruptive Conversations

Oh, the challenges of living on a big round ball with too many of these things called timezones.  Tonight, literally as I am writing this, there are a bunch of great folks about 100 miles away partaking in the Montreal Geek Dinner hosted by Mitch Joel and including Shel Holtz.  I consider both Mitch and Shel as friends and was very much looking forward to joining them tonight.  Michael Seaton, whom I have corresponded with but never met, is going to be there as well... plus some 30 or so others.  All in all it should be a dang good time.  For me, it's about a 2-hour drive, assuming no major delays at either the Canadian border crossing (usually not) or in Montreal rush-hour traffic (almost always).

Timezones nailed me, though.

In two ways.  First, I'm still finding myself seriously jet-lagged from the week in Cairo and the 6-hour difference.  Even though I got home late Friday night (well, really early Saturday morning) and have had the weekend to recover, I'm still dragging in the evenings... kind of after 6pm Eastern which is midnight in Egypt and was about the time I was going to bed over there.  So I had concerns about travelling 2 hours up to Montreal and 2 hours back tonight.

But the kicker was an appointment mixup.  Last week while in Cairo I accepted an appointment for a conference call that I swear was at 2:30pm.  So my plan was to have the call and then drive up to Montreal.  It was the kind of thing that I really had to do from my office, so I couldn't really drive and participate.  Well, today, on my Blackberry it was showing up as at 2:30pm... but on my laptop it was at 3:30pm!  I confirmed with the coordinator that it was 3:30... and that basically shot down the Montreal trip.

Sorry folks in Montreal, but you know the rules... customers have to come first!

Rather a bummer, but in light of my continuing adjustment to being back in VT, it's probably not the worst thing to stay here.  Still, it would have been great to see Shel and Mitch again and to meet Michael and the others.  I'd say that "I hope they have fun", but I know that is pretty much a given with that crowd!  I look forward now to hearing about it on the next episodes of FIR (Shel) and SPOS (Mitch). 

Ah, well, hopefully another time...   (or we'll just have to have folks down to Burlington!)

P.S. It was also another reminder that I don't think I actually upgraded by Blackberry to deal with the changed DST issue. Sigh...