Not an International GFE and not providing an International GFE, sorry!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/04/17 03:36 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/04/17/8401722.aspx

Content of Michael Kaplan's personal blog not approved by Microsoft (see disclaimer)!
Regular readers should keep in mind that all I said in The End? still applies; the allusion to the X-Files continues for people who understand such references....

So today our MVPs (Mihai and Mike) came over to building 24 and got the chance to talk to people from the various Windows International teams.

Everybody kept thanking me for setting up the meetings, but I didn't actually do very much -- just set up some meetings. The real effort was put in by:

• Jaimee, the admin who was awesomely able to get me the meeting space for all day in just two rooms with less only a full day's notice, in our building which never has space half the time for an hour meeting (and I looked at availability before I talked to her, it wasn't pretty!)
• The various folks from teams all over the building who showed up and talked about their product(s), feature(s), problems(s), and so on

Value is relative, but I look at the above two contributions as being of greater relative value than proper use of the clipboard and Outlook meeting requests. :-)

Anyway, at one point, Ian (who is also on the Windows International Fundamentals team) was explaining what we do and the description was very involved, and Mike asked him if he had to describe it in just a sentence or two what would it be. Ian's answer never made it down that small, but he got as close a he could while describing what all of the various folks are doing.

I was thinking about what that shorter description would be, and just couldn't think of anything.

Then I thought about how the main purpose was really to help fill in the gaps in international support.

So we are a bunch of International Gap Fillers.

And that we provide an International Gap Filling Experience (the word "Experience seems like one of those words that VP types like to hear these days).

And that as people on an engineering team, our titles were standard titles not so big now could be International Gap Filling Engineers.

Of course this train of thought derailed when I thought about the consequence of being called an International GFE or that we provided an International GFE -- based on the Urban Dictionary definition of GFE.

Even on the consulting side we don't do that kind of work!

So I am going to stick with that longer answer that Ian gave, it just seems safer -- and if words can be scary then acronyms can be even scarier. :-)

This blog brought to you by ꇥ (U+a1e5, aka YI SYLLABLE GAP)

John Cowan on 17 Apr 2008 9:23 AM:

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