Into the belly of the beast
The title of this post isn't entirely true. I wasn't inside the belly of the beast at all... more “across the road” really.
I fell out of bed at 6:15, stumbled around the house for a while, nearly cut my head off having a shave, took two goes at getting toothpaste on the end of the electric toothbrush (who knew it was so difficult?), and arrived at the local railway station in time for tea and medals.
Even though my ultimate destination was a Holiday Inn on a business park, knowing that the invitation came from Microsoft somehow changed the journey. I always have a creeping dread when it comes to “face to face” meetings with Microsoft engineers – imagining that they will have some kind of detection device that will go off when I enter the room.
I'm that guy who sits quietly in the presence of the blue t-shirted experts, knowing I have an Android phone in my pocket, an Android tablet in my bag, an Ubuntu laptop at home, several iPads, an other half with a Macbook, and several web servers out on the interwebs running various flavours of Linux.
No siren went off. Perhaps it was switched off (or running a Windows Update, har har).
The training course isn't what I expected at all. While there are labs that we can do if we wish via connections to computers “in the cloud”, most of the knowledge transfer is being done in lecture format. I prefer lectures to an extent, but at the end of the day I'm a developer. I write code. I invent. I don't sit in server rooms installing service packs, and figuring out who's been downloading porn, or why Fred's copy of Outlook won't connect.
Leaving the free coffee, cookies, and hot lunches of the Holiday Inn behind, the darkness, freezing fog, ice, and dusting of snow awaiting me on the railway platform was something of a shock to the system. My journey wasn't entirely uneventful though;
After finding a seat on the final train of my journey home, I almost jumped out of my skin as an elderly man sitting behind me called home on his mobile phone. He didn't really need the phone. As he bellowed away, and the entire train carriage full of people stared at him disbelievingly, I tried not to laugh – and the more I tried, the more people saw me, and started giggling too. The old man had no clue of the scene unfolding around him, as he shouted loud enough for his wife to hear him without the phone.
I can't wait to be old, stubborn, ignorant, andbelligerent. I guess some might argue I'm on my way there already...