Welcome to another edition of T-SQL Tuesday!
This month’s edition is hosted by my good friend and former SentryOne colleague Kevin Kline (b|t). For his T-SQL Tuesday topic, he asks bloggers to “Tell us the story of how attending an IT conference or event resulted in an amazing career or life opportunity.“
Been There, Done That
The thing is, I’ve already written about exactly that, when I first kicked off this blog after PASS Summit 2013: SQL Family Got Me Here. And nine years later, I’ve been blessed with a wealth of speaking opportunities, and two amazing jobs at SentryOne and Pure Storage.
Don’t Forget the Little Things
I’m not going to write about something that resulted in “an amazing” whatever. Instead I’ll share this story.
One evening, early in the week of my second PASS Summit, a friend was organizing a group to go out to dinner. I asked to tag along and they said sure, figuring the restaurant could accommodate one more. As we departed, we wound up picking up two more folks, who were also newcomers to PASS Summit and the SQL community.
When we got to the restaurant, we learned that they could not accommodate beyond the original reservation headcount at a single table, but could seat us three “tag-alongs” at our own table. Okay, that’s cool. Two of the three of us were relatively new friends and the third, I don’t quite recall if we were just Twitter friends at that point or what… but the point more was that we had a great time getting to know one another. We referred to ourselves at the “kids table.” Coincidentally because it was just the three of us and not a larger group, we managed to order, eat, and pay before the other table had even ordered their dinner!!!
Memories
That story is not an amazing life changing whatever… but it is one that has stuck with me, despite being insignificant in of itself. And the truly amazing thing is, I have many of these that I could share… mundane, but joyous gatherings of good people, who I am happy to have in my life in one way or another… and never would have met had I not gone to one of these conferences and pushed beyond my anti-social shell.
Thanks for reading.
Every Byte Counts 