Co-Workers Who Rock

Some of the people at my company with whom I do not work terribly close have a superb knowledge of test-driven design and development, and have started running these wonderful "TDD Jump-Start" training sessions at my company on occasion, and that is just the sort of thing I've been clamoring for throughout the past year.

The team on which I work was scheduled to get the TDD Jump-Start today.  Vrooooom!!  This should have been greeted with hoots and hollers of joyous celebration, but instead it was met with me waking up feeling like Iron Man himself somehow sneaked his way into my condo, and had been stomping down on my head repeatedly throughout the entire night.  As hard as he could.

I was about to try to head in for the training, potentially leading Iron Man to countless other employees for a head-stomping extravaganza (or perhaps I'd just be spreading a stupid virus... I like the Iron Man interpretation better), but decided that would be exceedingly selfish, and really could wind up making a bunch of people sick.  No good.

Thankfully, one of my awesome co-workers came to my rescue.  We're both primarily .NET developers, but we also both happen to love Macs.  Since he brings his MacBook Air to work most days, I asked him for a huge favor:  To part with his beloved MacBook Air for the four hours of training.  Agreeing to this without batting an eye (it was over the phone, but the rapid response indicated zero eye-batting), he went into the training room, set up his laptop facing the screen and where the presenter would be, and got it positioned just right so that I could "call" him using Apple's Face Time video-chat app (Skype would likely be a perfectly viable option on a non-Mac OS), and be at home... Attending the training.  w00t!

It was far from perfect... It was extraordinarily difficult (ok, it was impossible) to read text on the screen, and if there was a lot of ambient noise in the room, the audio would start to cut out from time to time.  So that was a bummer... However, it was still great to get as much as I could out of it (I could see the slide-deck well enough to follow along on the copy which I downloaded), rather than miss the whole event.  We should have worked out some screen-sharing strategy with the speaker, but this was a very last-minute thing, so we had what we had, and that was that.

What is the lesson learned here?  First, that my co-worker absolutely rocks (I am in the extremely fortunate position of working with a whole bunch of truly great people).  Second, while using a video-conferencing type solution to this problem is not the greatest of options, it is a long-shot better than nothing... Especially if you have the speaker's slide-deck.  If you can work out some screen-sharing, that would have made it phenomenal.  I am officially sending out a huge vote of thanks to my awesome co-worker who helped me out today!!  Hope I get to pay back the favor some time.