Zing!

I was totally burned by Matt today in a meeting.

We started the day with an 8 AM meeting together (video conference with Europe), and I thought I was going to get through the day with the upper hand when Matt went to the wrong room (he blamed the early time), using state-of-the-art technology to connect two Mountain View rooms that were only separated by the floor/ceiling as his room was directly below mine. Man, he must have felt pretty silly for those 30 seconds before he came upstairs.

As the meeting went on, my phone started beeping loudly on I believe three different occasions, even prompting Matthew to send me snarky trans-Atlantic comments about the disturbances via IM. Each time it started beeping I scrambled to turn it off, but wasn’t able to silence it quickly since I’m still not an Android ninja (I haven’t switched back to my iPhone). So there I was, spending most of the hour looking like a bumbling technologically illiterate fool who doesn’t know how to put his phone on vibrate at work.

What had happened was that since I use my phone as my alarm clock, and I’m usually not at work (and often not out of bed) during the hour of the meeting, my alarms were going off, which logically isn’t subject to the restrictions of “silent mode.” And it wasn’t just a single disturbance because I’m so not a morning person that I have five alarms set on my phone: 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:30, and 9:00. I think we heard the 8:30 and 9:00 alarms, and I may have accidentally snoozed one making it go off twice. Why starting at 5 AM? Because as much as I’m not a morning person, I want to get into work early. It hardly ever happens.

Anyway, in a later meeting, Matt was the last to arrive. I thought it would be hilarious to bring back an old team tradition where the last arrival had to tell a joke. Just as I called him out, someone else’s phone rang. Without missing a beat, Matt asked, “Wysz, is that your phone?” The rest of the group looked at him, confused. He simply said, “That’s my joke,” and sat down.