An evening at a conference

Topics/tags: Autobiographical, short

It’s Thursday night. I’m at a conference in Orlando [1]. What am I doing? I’m hanging out in my hotel room.

Why?

A few reasons.

I’m an introvert. I’ve spent the day talking to people. That drains me. I’m even more drained because my day talking to people yesterday went until 10:00 p.m. So the thought of going out to dinner with people, even people I like a lot [2], is not very attractive.

Email accumulates. I have not had time to read email since Tuesday afternoon, other than a quick check once in a while. I have way too much to catch up on already, so I don’t want to wait another day or two. How much is too much? I’ve spent two hours reading and responding to messages this evening. And, believe it or not, that leaves some other tasks undone.

I wanted to muse. I didn’t have a chance to write yesterday. I was up too late at the conference last night. I had also gotten up way too early.

I’m in the midst of Julie Schumacher’s The Shakespeare Requirement. I deserve a little bit of time to relax and read a few chapters [5].

Yeah, that’s enough. Staying in was the right choice.

[1] The ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, to be precise.

[2] Yes, there are awesome people at Tapia, including some long-term professional friends [3,4].

[3] No, not people whose profession is friend; people who I know professionally and who I consider friends in that context.

[4] There’s a badge tag this year that says Professional Attendee. I keep wanting to ask people if they are paid to attend the conference and, if so, how I get such a gig.

[5] Reminder to self: Do not stay up late to finish the book.

Version 1.0 released 2018-09-20.

Version 1.0.1 of 2018-09-21.