Out of the way

Skype++ # opening the perspective of the web a bit

Apart from providing a tool that I use a lot, I found something else to like about Skype. I am living on a series of temporary machines because my old one died and I am still waiting for Apple to deliver the new one (yep, I'm a Mac fan. They're not really physically robust laptops, so I am also a fan of their extended care warranty ).

I wanted to install Skype on a windows computer I have. So how impressed was I that their installation instructions actually showed me the relevant screenshots from Opera? Well, I am curious about what other browsers they have on the list, but it seemed pretty cool to me.

Rich Romero++ # being helpful and easy going

When my Apple did die, I was in a bit of a pickle. I was travelling too fast to leave it anywhere for repairs, and I needed to get the data from it to give a talk. (I had just written it, so no backup, and didn't want to have to do it again...)

He set me up with a sensible backup system on the genius bar at the Florida Mall Apple Store, helped me grab the data to CD and get quickly back to working with as good a setup as I could hope for.

Gitta Mejer++ # for going way above and beyond the call...

I was in Copenhagen. The benefit of a lot of travel is that even flying on unchangeable non-refundable back-of-the-bus tickets I have enough frequent flyer mojo to go into a business lounge. So I can get work done, have a shower, skip the main queue for check-in and ticketing, and a few other useful things. And at the desk there I was served by Gitta Mejer.

She helped me out of a huge airline ticketing pickle, by staying back a couple of extra *hours* at work and figuring out how to make the supposedly impossible happen. I have been a regular customer of the same travel agent for 7 years, because she does that for me (and gets good flights, prices, and knows what she is doing), and I have colleagues and ex-colleagues who do that as a matter of course (hello Doug, Gorm, Koalie, Michelle, Tatsuki, Vibeke, and too many others to list). But I thought that was rare in someone who could have handed the problem to a colleague, or just decided that it wasn't worth waiting 45 minutes on hold to see if she could improve on what she had already done.

And when I went in again to say thank you, she claimed that all that was part of her job. It isn't, but I was extremely grateful that she did it.

I've had a few things go really wrong in the last month (banking is my personal nightmare at the best of times and I didn't appreciate the guys I met outside Biddy Mulligan's nrealy as much as I appreciated the staff there), but these have been good things that random people have done, and I'm feeling pleased about the world today.

How do you give the extra holidays to the people who deserve them because they work so much extra time? And how can you ask that person to always be there, when you know that they deserve to take more time off than they ever will anyway?