“I'm in a field with 60k people watching it.”
I was in Amsterdam when the Netherlands played Uruguay in the World Cup semifinal. The match was on a giant screen at Museumplein, and the whole place went orange.
The Netherlands won 3-2 and reached the final. NOS reported the celebration across Amsterdam, including the crowd at Museumplein losing it after the second-half goals.
I was trying to answer a work email in the middle of all that.
The thread was about a proposal and some numbers that needed another pass. The person on the other end could not talk because he had a sick child at home. I told him not to worry. My own location was not exactly suitable for a conference call either.
Good times. Great news.
The trip was part work and part the kind of travel I kept squeezing around work. I had left New York for Amsterdam, would continue through Kansas City and Denver, then head to Austin for HostingCon before going home.
Two days later, I sent a photo from Amsterdam with no body text. It showed three of us out at night, grinning at an iPhone camera, drinks in hand. The subject was simply “Good photo.”
The work did not stop because I was traveling. Peek still needed help with its mobile-network launch. Reality Check still had systems to run. The side-business proposal still needed revised numbers.
For a few hours, none of those things was the loudest thing in the field.