The odd room

My final conference experiences worth sharing, since that was really the highlight of the week (out of the events that I can share publicly)...

So, everyone who worked for Microsoft at the conference was given a ribbon to indicate their job. Developers got blue, testers got yellow, and program managers got orange. I didn't see many testers there, but I did see a lot of blue and orange. But, you didn't need to look at the ribbon color to tell them apart: the ones who were dressed stylishly or businesslike were the program managers, and the ones wearing overused tacky free T-shirts who hadn't shaved since Monday were the developers.

And then there was the worst session I attended all week. I thought it was going to be interesting, but the title was very misleading, and the topic was terrible, the presentation was worse, and the presenter himself was much, much worse. The guy actually showed us samples of the kinds of graphs he made for his team, and what the status emails he writes looked like. Anyway, the room had such an odd collection of people in it. So many mesh shirts! I don't know what on earth was going on, but the guy who was there to tell the presenter when he was going over, and two women in the audience, were all wearing see-through mesh shirts. It was odd, even for engineers. I don't think I'd seen another mesh shirt at work before that. Directly in front of me was the woman with loose pants and no underwear, and in the other corner of the room was a woman who looked like she was about seventy-five, asking questions about popular screen resolutions. I work with some strange people.