01/15/1999   English German
  Edition # 13  
San Francisco, 01-15-1999

At AOL Headquarters
Figure [1]: The headquarters of AOL -- in Dulles, Virginia

Michael In the second week of December, I had the honor of visiting the headquarters of AOL in Dulles, Virginia (very close to the capital of the USA, Washington D.C.) to give a two-day course on a programming language (for the experts among you: Tcl) for the folks there. Since Virginia is on the East Coast and we live on the West Coast of America, I had to set off on a Sunday morning, sit on a plane for five hours, rent a car, and navigate through a maze of highways to find the hotel and AOL. Not so easy, since my chief navigator Angelika wasn't with me. So, I arrived at Washington airport at 9 PM, rented a car, and (who would have thought?) promptly got lost. Anyone familiar with the Washington area knows that one highway leads into another and that once you miss an exit, there's no turning back because you have to go through three interchanges before you can take the next exit and turn around. I managed to pass the same toll booth twice, luckily it only cost 25 cents each time. There were large funnels set up there, into which you could toss the appropriate coin with a big swing and half out of the car window while driving, super cool! Fortunately, I had enough coins with me.

Then, of course, there was the three-hour time difference to overcome, so that, calculated by San Francisco time, I got up at 3 AM and started the lecture at 6 -- but in the end, I managed to chatter almost non-stop for an average of six hours a day and tell funny stories from the life of a web engineer. Americans expect much more than anyone else that a course is primarily "fun." Since it took them no more than three seconds to realize from my accent that I'm not American, I immediately told them where I'm from, and from then on everything went smoothly, and the people actually enjoyed it. Maybe one day I'll become a great speaker after all, anything is possible!

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