People at Microsoft Treat Me Good.
This week I got an email from Finula Crowe (no blog, which sucks - this is an article about her getting her job :). She was letting me know that a special package was on it's way, and also telling me a secret number which was mine and mine only.
Today I did something with the number - numbers have such power, don't they? If you have a special secret number too, then you can use it to log in here, like I did :)
Today I got home to find a card in the mailbox telling me to haul my ass down to the post office and pick something up, since I was rude enough to be at work instead of home to accept the delivery.
So tomorrow morning, bright and early, I'm heading off to pick my package. Finally, my own set of MSDN Universal media to call my own.
Fin, Frank, you guys rock. Thanks ever so much for so much for sorting this out for me. Now I really need to get some more computers at home so that I can install all the goodies at once! (Or upgrade one so that I can Virtual Server the lot :)
Last week (or so) I hit a performance issue with serialization, and spoke to both Chuck and James Manning (my ISV buddy) about it. Both were quick off the mark - Chuck got me a specific answer to my main question really quick. James asked me enough questions to make think about what I was doing and reason out the behaviour so I could determine a decent workaround. He also confirmed a couple of other questions. Both these guys are very busy - Chuck's organising Teched, James is head-down on the security push for VSTS, but they had time to help. You guys rock too.
Other guys as well have been useful to me in the recent past. Had a quick question, fired it off to Rob Caron, had an answer 5 minutes later. Several times in the course of my blog, I've mentioned a problem with something, or talked about something, and a Microsoftie has chimed in with a comment to help in the right direction - Raymond Chen and Bruce Morgan stick out in my mind as the ones that most amazed me. All these guys read (or somehow arrived at even once) my blog? But I'm no one!
This is something that I've particularly noticed in the last 12 months - and never would have imagined as possibly being the case previous to that. If you ask for help, you get it, and generally the turn around time is super speedy. If it's not, someone is actually following up and keeping you up to date (a great example of this recently was when my MSDN Connection membership screwed up royally. It took a long time to sort out - in fact, it didn't sort out, I just created a new passport and recreated my account, but Caroline Price kept touching base with me about it).
Sometimes I think we need a 'Hug a Microsoftie' day. And we need some Microsofties to travel around the country that day so that everyone gets access to the hug-fest. Alternatively, we could get an enlarged whack-a-mole game, and get microsofties to randomly poke their heads up through the holes. You'd use a soft hammer of course!
Listening to: that ain't bad - ratcat - (4:06)