Charlie Meatball

Checking in at the airport I run into Kurt DelBene.  Kurt runs ODP which is basically the server-side of Microsoft’s Office group - SharePoint, PerformancePoint, etc. - and the group I’m here working with, Duet, is part of his org.  Turns out he’s on my flight and will be working from the IDC (India development center) next week.  I introduce myself, chat with him a bit as we’re being checked into the flights, and when his stuff is wrapped up (I’m checking on business class upgrades), he says he’ll see me on the flight.  Cool.

Oh yeah, while I was complaining, did I mention I’m on a twenty-plus hour economy flight (when anything longer than 8 hours is supposed to be business class by company policy)? And because I booked so late I’m on a middle seat?  At 6′2″, flying is never comfy, but a middle seat in economy?  Really?  I spend the first leg of the trip with a very large man’s elbow firmly planted in my rib.  9 hours of flying and I spend all of it trying to box-out my neighbor for the arm-rest and avoid glaring at him.

The one cool thing about the flight is that on the other side of me is a friend of a friend, Jean, who is nice and good to talk to.  Turns out she knows my friend Wolfe, and we talk a while about what a great guy he is, traveling, Seattle, politics, whatever.

There’s always this awkward thing on planes where, no matter how much you like the person next to you - even if they’re your soulmate - at some point you want to stop talking and just watch the Chronicles of Narnia or do a sudoku or whatever.  That moment of “I’m now deciding to stop talking to you in order to watch a talking badger and a dwarf” is never easy to do.  Do you apologize?  Do you just put the headphones on?  And what happens when one of you puts the headphones on and the other one doesn’t realize it and starts talking?  Awk-warrrd!

Arrive in Frankfurt feeling sorry for myself and still glaring at the back of the dude’s head and his wife who was sitting *across the aisle from him*.  In Frankfurt I run into Dev, a product manager on the mobile team, who not only knows a couple of my friends (Melissa from work and Mark lacrosse) but has been to India before and takes me a bit under his wing as to what to expect both at work and around town.  It feels a lot safer having someone who’s been there before to talk to, and I realize again how scary it is on some level to be going halfway around the world and leaving behind everything familiar.

Of course the shock and the discomfort of the new are strongly tied to the excitement and the joy of discovery for me, so even just feeling scared starts to get me excited.  In the waiting area around the flight to Hyderabad, the mix has gone from 90-10 white on my last flight to 5-95 Indian.  I realize that’s the highest concentration of white folks I’m likely to see for a while!

This brings up an interesting subject insofar as Dev is from St. Louis and, so far as I can tell, is about as culturally American as I am.  Now he’s definitely Indian-American, but second generation, and compared to the other folks around us in the waiting area, it’s clear just how American we both are in the way we talk, act, dress, and even do things like make eye contact, use gestures, and sit.  At the same time, Dev looks like the other Indians there, and he helps me to realize how alien I will look the entire time I’m in India.  I think this is the first time I’ll be traveling for such a long time and feeling like “the other” for all of it.

Talking with Dev is great and we grab a snack in the airport before hopping back on the flight.  I’m nervous for the flight, but at least I have an aisle seat.  My fears are unfounded as I pass right out on the flight and wake three hours from Hyderabad.  My seat-mate is a very interesting and intelligent older Indian gentleman with whom I talk politics for a while.  I explain why, while I used to have tremendous respect for McCain it went away after he forgave Bush/Rove for their tactics against him in the 2000 GOP primaries.  When I pull out the New Yorker I have with me and start reading, I realize it says many of the same things I had been saying about the choice of Palin being very short-sighted and cynical, so I share it with my seat-mate, who takes a great deal of interest in it, laughing at how “radical” the view point it espouses is (I disagree, calling it definitely liberal, but only looking radical because it’s talking sensibly about topics in a way that’s hard to find given cable news programs in the right-ward lurch that is the result of Fox News - he agrees).  In the remaining flight he seemingly reads the whole magazine cover-to-cover, stopping at times to tell me how good he thinks the writing is, comparing it to British and Indian writing, and chatting about various subjects.  As we’re getting off the plane, he gives me his business card and tells me that I should give him a call and we should get dinner while I’m in town.  All-in-all the flight is great, and it’s nice that my first experience meeting an Indian on my trip is so positive and welcoming.