by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/09/23 18:45 -07:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/09/23/473486.aspx
This is not a post about the Company Meeting itself, which happened today. I am sure that with all the trouble they take to limit attendance to fulltime employees that it would be a violation of one NDA or another to post about it. :-)
But I thought I would post about the accessibility aspects, since that speaks more to Safeco Field than to anything provided by Microsoft....
(I guess everyone knows now how often I go to games there!)
You see, this was my first Company Meeting at Microsoft, despite the fact that it is the third one that I was eligible to show up at.
The first one was at Safeco Field but it was a B.S. (Before Scooter!) date, and I was missing most events that sounded like they would need a lot of walking by that point.
The second one was a virtual meeting, but it is too easy to just get some work done if I am in my office anyway.
But this third one was an A.S. (Anno Scootori, b.k.a. "year of our scooter") date, so it seemed like I should give it a try.
I shied away from taking a bus since it is easier to drive when I am taking the scooter, and I decided after thinking about it to shy away from sitting with my group until I understood what the accessibility story was. This is totally a weird thing about me but I just have a hard time going in without knowing what is happening and everyone wanting to help, etc. -- it just feels more comfortable I have a chance to triage the whole situation first. I figured I could meet up with them during the break if all was going well, anyway.
So, I spent the first half on the field level, and everything went well. I could reach all that I needed to, I had a 62.5% hit rate with the joke I used the eight times confused people on the floor looking for their teams asked "what group is sitting here?"
(the joke answer was "I don't know, I am a singleton." -- I think the devs got it!)
Anyway, during the break I headed up to the 200 level to where a bunch of people from GIFT/GPTS were going to be, and I even hung out with them for a bit. But I did notice the seats up there were not as accessible, so as the break drew to a close I decided to say farewell to everyone and head back down to the field.
But the meeting itself was pretty cool, and I am glad I finally made it to one, since I have been hearing about them for many years now.
I should probably get over feeling that strange need to triage situations before exposing people to watching me deal with them for the first time. I doubt anyone would really feel bad about it other than me, so if I just got over it, then all would be fine. But then I think about times like today -- would people have felt weird if I couldn't sit with them when I had planned to? I wouldn't want to make people change plans or anything.
Maybe I'll try to talk people into getting seats down on the field next year? :-)
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