International Man of Mystery

This past week has been one of the worst weeks of my life…

I was on my way to the Gilbane Conference in Boston on Wednesday. Frank Gilbane had invited me on the key note panel on the Future of Content Management. I was really looking forward to this. I would be on the same panel as Microsoft and it was a real opportunity to give them crap.

Before going to the conference, I went to meet a customer in Boston first. Since Kevin Cochrane had been working with the customer, I called him prior to see if there was anything I needed to know about. Before I had a chance to ask anything, Kevin asked me how the conference was.

“WHAT?!? I’m not speaking until tomorrow!” I exclaimed.

“Oh?” replied Kevin, “My mistake. I’m sure you are right.” He then went on to describe the current development at the customer. I didn’t hear a word he was saying. I was panicking. I asked him to look up the conference agenda and sure enough, I had missed the session.

Somehow I managed to have a very interesting discussion with the customer about their enterprise roll out and their plans to build additions to Alfresco as community contributions. But I rushed off immediately to the Westin Copley Place where the conference was being held.

I arrived at the registration desk at the conference looking anxiously for Frank. I said that I should have been here yesterday. It didn’t take any more than that for one of the organizers to say, “Oh, you were the guy that missed the keynote.” “Doh!” I thought, but I think something a bit stronger came out of my mouth.

They ushered me over to Frank who seems like he doesn’t really get flustered by anything. Previously, unbeknownst to me, he had sent an email asking if everything was okay. I sheepishly explained that I had the wrong day in my calendar. Although, this probably caused some embarrassment on everyone’s part, he indicated that it was okay. He did say that they could have used the open source perspective on the panel. I was still invited to the reception that evening.

At the reception I saw lots of people I knew, almost all of them asking what happened. Some didn’t know and I didn’t volunteer. I saw Tony Byrne who declared me the “International Man of Mystery”. I saw Dan Keldsen from Delphi Group and chatted about the industry in general. I passed by Mike Carey and Andy Grygiel who are at MarkLogic, but used to be at Documentum. They asked what happened and said I had the organizers running around all over the place looking for me. When I asked for a new program since I didn’t receive one when I hurriedly registered upon arrival, another organizer said, “Oh, the Keynote Guy.” I received an indirect inquiry from Matt Asay from Nick Patience of 451 Group who asked what happened. This wasn't just going to go away.

In the end it was a great conference. I got to see a lot of well connected people in ECM. It was good to meet up with Alan Pelz-Sharpe again who is now at CMS Watch and Seth Gottlieb from Optaros. It was really good to see and catch up wiht Razmik Abnous, who was employee number 4 at Documentum and has just been promoted to CTO of the Content Management and Archiving group at EMC.

Let me recommend that if you are asked to participate in a key note, that you actually show up. It is very stressful not to. I even considered not even showing up for a few seconds. If I did skip, here are my top 5 excuses for not showing…

5. I stopped off at Itsu in London Piccadilly to have sushi with a Russian friend of mine and contracted a mysterious illness

4. I could have sworn Frank Gilbane said Boston, England

3. I tried to board the airplane, but they wouldn't let me on with 15 ounces of mouthwash

2. A band of Cubans hijacked the plane to head to Havana for Castro's 80th birthday party

1. A gang of Microsoft Program Managers abducted me at a roadside checkpoint and warned me to convert to Sharepoint or Ray Ozzie would personally video the consequences

Comments

[Carole]

And I thought *I* had a rough week! Missing your own keynote takes the cake!