It's a Small World
Yesterday at 9:30 p.m., I received a phone call while I was in my hotel room. Turns out that while I was at RealTime, staying at the Del Coronado in San Diego, a high-school friend of mine, Tammy Reasoner, who works for Allen Press Inc. in Kansas, was staying at a Hyatt across town while exhibiting at a conference organized by the Council of Science Editors.

I haven't seen Tammy since an August 2001 reunion of Fort Atkinson High School alumni, and we don't touch base with each other that often even though she's probably one of the people I've talked to more often since graduating from high school.

Anyhoo, some colleagues of Tammy's visited the Coronado during their conference because it's supposedly haunted -- and when they returned to the Hyatt, Tammy made the connection between their visit, the signs they saw for RealTime and Fast Company, and me... and called the hotel on the off chance that I was in fact here. I was. So we met for lunch today. And it was fun. We caught up on post-reunion gossip and life changes, discussed the differences between our two conferences (and, ahem, hotels), and enjoyed the San Diego sun.

Just goes to show: The best way to make your world smaller is to make your world bigger. The more people you know around the world -- regardless of how often you communicate or collaborate with them -- the better the chances that you'll encounter people you know randomly. That's pretty rad.