The MySQL All-Company Meeting in Orlando is now over. Many are already back at home (= back at work), and others are in transition. What a meeting!

One of the mildest surprises of the week were the name tags carrying a flag that represented the country of residence, as opposed to nationality. These matters are emotional. While I happen to like Germany, it’s not as if I were German. Teased by others for deserting my native country of Finland, I spent time retaliating at innocent fellow countrymen for their “even more foreign” flag than mine. Max Mether had a French flag. Birgitta Löfberg had a Swedish flag (OK, that’s the least foreign, but still foreign). And, for the largest distance from Finland, Mårten Mickos carried a US flag. Eminently teasable.

Also, on my initial name tag, I had the title “Sr. Director Sales Operations”. However, it turned out not to be an innovative way for HR to tell me about being transferred to a new position, but to be a mere mistake. I must have complained too loudly to our All-Company Meeting organiser, Michael Schiff (whose daytime job includes being “Sr. Director Sales Operations”), since he “rewarded” me by handing out a new name tag:

I happily carried that name tag on the flip side of my real tag throughout the conference, and I got many more jokes and laughs out of the flag that I carried, than the title “Schiff’s Admin.”. Ah, flags have so many connotations.

Michael Schiff: You did a superb job arranging the All-Company Meeting! And remember to calibrate that against the Scandinavian scale, where “not bad” in Scandinavian translates to “great” in American. Thank you! Happy to be your Admin anytime!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 17:21 and is filed under Events, MySQL, Virtual company. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.