I was Co-presenting with Russ Faustino on "Building Differentiated User Experiences with Windows Vista" part of the Vista Launch , last Tuesday in Ft. Lauderdale . I arrived at the beautiful Hyatt Pier 66 in Ft. Lauderdale, paid my $8 Valet parking and waited for my 2:00 PM session. One o’clock comes, Russ goes on stage and does his usual great intro to over 700 attendees (standing room only).
Then it was my turn to do my thing. 10 minutes into my demo I was talking about vector graphics and Russ jumps in and asks me to show everyone the Magnifier, so I launched the magnifier and you guessed it my laptop froze. I blamed the projector and attempted to kill the process in task manager. It took a while but it finally died. During this agonizing 30-40 seconds I made a few jokes and after the process was killed I guaranteed that nothing else could go wrong and started a new WPF application in Visual Studio.
I did the basic Hello World App by adding a XAML button and code behind to change the color of the button. I ran the app and as soon as I clicked on the button, I heard this huge explosion from behind the stage. I made another attempt at a joke about Vista and WPF power, and to my surprise everyone laughed and I moved on to my next demo.
Now I am hearing a lot of yelling and screaming from the room behind us. Apparently no one in the audience could hear this because of the position of the speakers.
While I was doing my next demo, all kinds of thoughts were going through my head . Did someone get shot? Did a car run into the building? Is it Al-Qaida and Steve Jobs getting together to kill 2000 Microsoft Vista enthusiasts? Thank god I have done this presentation a few times before.
5 minutes later fire alarms go off and a voice came over the PA system, directing people to evacuate the building due to a gas leak. Apparently a gas stove exploded in the kitchen which was right behind the stage.
I have sinus issues and rarely can smell anything, but I could smell the gas. I looked up and everyone was rushing out, did I mention there were over 700 people in the room and only two doors to exit.
So I did what came naturally, started to hibernate my laptop, packed the power supply and grabbed my notes while my laptop was hibernating (which seemed like it took days). I put ''the lapper'' in my bag and got off the stage.
I look in front of me and there are at least 100 people still trying to get out of the room. Right then one of the attendee’s walked over and stoped in front of me blocking my exit. He was not fazed a bit by all the commotion and turmoil around us and calmly said, “Hey do you think we can do the raffle now? I have to leave early.”
I wish I was making this up but I am not.