Murphy’s Law (from: Jim)
http://www.jambo.net/blog/archives/2005/03/murphys_law.html
Always be ready, because what can go wrong, will.
No one in the audience noticed how close we came to aborting our demo at TED. In fact, the demo went off very, very well. No technical glitches, everyone on stage was very composed, lighthearted - a professional, fun demo from the audience’s perspective. But, oh, it could have been very bad indeed.
As the audience begain pouring into the room for our session, I’m still onstage, hooking up equipment - I see Jeff Bezos sit down. John Doerr, Pierre Omidyar - the list goes on. I plug Charles’ laptop into the VGA, and his trackpad freezes! We have one speaker before us (20minutes), so the stage tech tells me to unplug the laptop and go backstage to fix it, and he’ll sneak it onto the stage. The lights go down and the speaker starts, and I’m in full panic. I reboot - the trackpad is still not working. With 14 minutes to go, I decide to cut my losses and sprint back to the hotel to get another laptop and load Jambo onto it. I’m back in 10 minutes, and the stage-tech needs the laptop right then. We walk onto stage with a totally untested environment running. The demo works as planned, but it was *way* too close for comfort. I learned a whole slew of lessons that day. While I had met Murphy many, many times before, it had always been within a certain comfort zone. On this day, I got to know him face-to-face - too close for comfort. Always be ready.