Edit: Still good options, especially if more people joined in.
Originally posted June 3, 2014 on AIXchange
Recently I attended a conference and ran into someone who was engaged in a futile search for another attendee. This acquaintance had been scanning the crowd for days with no luck.
After complaining about the fact that the font size that was used for attendee badges, both first and last names, should have been bigger so that the names could be more easily read from a distance, we bandied about some potential solutions.
Twitter? Perhaps this elusive attendee would notice a tweet. What about adding this person as a friend on Facebook, or sending a message on LinkedIn? Someone else in our group suggested contacting the conference organizers to see if they could get a mobile number for this person, but that option seemed pretty shady. I know I wouldn’t want conference organizers to hand out my personal contact info willy nilly.
Ultimately, the best suggestion was pretty old school. Just go to the front desk and ask if this individual is staying at the hotel, and if so, leave an old-fashioned paper message. Obviously that wasn’t a high-tech solution, especially coming from a bunch of AIX pros, but it did, in fact, work.
I believe there’s a lesson in this anecdote. How often do you immediately turn to some sexy, leading-edge solution to accomplish some task or address some problem, when a simple, tried and true method will do the job more quickly and/or effectively?
For instance, I constantly hear people say we need more online AIX forums. But we already have online forums. So why not use the resources we currently have, like IRC and the AIX mailing list?
These resources remain valuable. Try them, if you haven’t already. You’ll find good advice from admins who are online and willing to help.
I’m all for progress; I certainly don’t miss my alphanumeric pager. But sometimes, those tried and true, old-school methods are still the way to go.