A Dane, a Norwegian, and a South AfricanThe Horror Resort has been full the last two days with 400 biotech executives and five DLA Piper lawyers. The setting is still abysmal but at least the company has improved.
Substantially.
I do love conferences -- I don't care what anyone says they are supremely useful and an enormous amount of business gets transacted around the edges. The presentations and panel discussions are just decorative background to the real work which is done over coffee and standing in the lunch line and complaining collectively about the weather. And I'm very good at conferences. Very. That is why I need to be the Firm Emissary. Or as someone recently suggest, Regent. "Hi, I'm Kim Egan, Firm Regent." That would sound good in the lunch line.
Speaking of the lunch line, I was standing in it yesterday and I hear a man behind me say "Yes, South Africa," in a way that only people who have spent time in Africa would recognize as a true blue South African accent. I turned around and there was a very handsome man looking straight at me. "South Africa?" "Yes, but you wouldn't know anything about that, now would you?" "Au contraire, I spent my earliest years of life in Durban and most of elementary school in Lusaka." Enter Ian Wisenberg, who turns out to be good friends of my friend Lisa and who announced in the lunch line, "I am a big fan of DLA Piper." "Excellent -- we are big fans of South Africans."
This is the third time in three weeks I have met someone from Southern Africa. In all the decades since I left Africa I have not run into ANY and now I have run into three in three weeks. It's a clearly a sign .
I stare at Wisenberg's mid-section trying to read his name tag and figure out what his company is. "Connect? Like the San Diego CONNECT?" "CFO Connect," he corrected me. But yes, San Diego. "Do you connect CFOs?" "We provide temporary CFO services." "Are you, yourself, a CFO?" "I am!" "A temporary one?" "Well, no."
I brought Wisenberg back into the conference room with me and plunked him down next to Lisa and said, "I have just met this friend of yours and I would like to keep him, please." Wisenberg says, "Lisa, if you had told me your friend Kim was from South Africa then maybe I would have made it to dinner last night." (Recall the unrulies and the Duchess of York dinner at Bottega in Yountville -- turns out he was supposed to go).
So we three sit in a row watching a panel discussion that imagines we are in 2020 looking back on the last 10 years of the life sciences industry. It was somewhat surreal -- Chelsea Clinton is president, the oil leak in the Gulf still isn't plugged, laser beams shoot into your retinas from your bathroom mirror and read your chromosomes and tell you if you have been exposed to a virus and then the mirror phones in your prescription for you and you're set to go. This can also be accomplished by spitting into your blackberry, in 2020. Lisa, a little worse for wear from the previous night at Bottega, whispers to me, "If I spit into my blackberry all it would tell me is that I am hungover." Lisa fades back out of things for a bit and then the panel says "and now the minimum wage in the US is lower than that of China or India."
Lisa perks up and looks at me and Wisenberg and says, "really?!??!" We look at her for a moment in confusion and then say, in unison -- "In 2020, you idiot, not now." "OH!" Hysterical giggles.
The next thing on the agenda was the DLA Piper reception we were throwing at the conference which was mobbed with fascinating men doing exotic things. I went and changed into evening attire and walked smack into Wisenberg as I entered the room. "Hello, darling, did you change just for me?" "Yes, and aren't you are a lucky banda" (said in South African accent). People looked at us funny.
At this reception I found myself at one point sandwiched between a Norwegian and a Dane. You will recall that in Orlando last week I was also sandwiched between a Norwegian and a Dane. Then, as now, the two fell to bickering about Denmark's past colonization of Norway and the complete and abject failure of either country to do anything much with Greenland. I listened to them for a while and said, "yes, well, do consider what you can do with salmon?" They erupted in laughter and said, "That's always what we end up saying on this subject!" "I know," I said, and turned away.
Behind me was a tall man with the name tag that said Leif Janson. "What sort of name is that -- Are you a Viking?" "Yes, actually." "Is your sister Leifa Jansdottier?" "No, that only works in Iceland -- and anyway, the dottir goes after the mother's maiden name." "How confusing. How do you figure out who's related to whom?" "We know that already -- everyone is related to everyone. It's not a very interesting subject for us." Fascinating, no?
I read Leif's name tag and discovered he works for a company named DeCODE. "What do you decode, the genome?" "Yes," "Human genomes?" "Yes, we are decoding the genome of Icelandics." "No, really, what do you decode." "No, really, we work exclusively on Icelanders." Fascinating again, no? He went on -- "Icelanders are all related to each other and we have excellent public health information and genealogies going back to 800 A.D. (or something) and our database contains a million Icelanders." "Are there as many as 1 million Icelanders?" "No, there are only 350,000, that's why we have to go back to 800 A.D." And with that I decided I liked my new Viking friend.
So then Lisa and I take take Wisenberg and Leif to the "off-site" reception which was outside in a garden that was crawling, simply crawling, with peacocks. Lisa had prada heels on and kept accidentally pinning herself to the lawn with her heels while I chased the peacocks around with my blackberry camera trying to get good shots. Lisa would be stuck to the lawn mewling after me, "wait, wait! it's not fair! my shoes!" Wisenberg and Leif watched us decorously from afar. Then a girl peacock appeared on the scene and within seconds all the male peacocks exploded into their huge fans of plumage and twirled in desparate circles, screaming. The girl peacock was totally unimpressed and wandered away. But I guess the male peacocks, once they have exploded, can't really shut themselves down very quickly so they twirled and screamed and waved in the wind for a good 15 minutes. Lisa and I concluded that was rather pathetic and made them seem somewhat less manly in retrospect and what a dumb evolutionary move to be so completely incapacitated by your own plumage for such a long period of time. Wisenberg said men in South Africa don't bother with feathers. Leif said the same applied to Iceland.
And that was that. Except that this morning as I was steeling myself to leave Leif appeared and sat down and said, "I didn't know you were leaving today. Change your flight and let's go have an adventure instead." "Like what," I said pathetically. "It's pouring down rain and freezing outside. What would we do. Go to Tomales Bay and eat oysters or something?" "That would work," he said. And he was serious. He worked on me for about half an hour to try to get me to go oystering with him. I refused -- I was so excited to be leaving the Horror Resort that I had to stick with plan A and GO GO GO. Leif actually lives in DC -- so I told me we would just go adventuring at some point in DC. Or I could get him to come into the office and give a talk to our lawyers about the rare, Icelandic allele or telemere or whatever. But then somehow we got to talking about how working for a living was way too time consuming and he told me what he really wants to do is walk from Argentina to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and I said I wanted to ride a horse from Cape Town to Cairo, and he said he was very envious of me becuase 'You've done it right," he said. "You are single and have no children and are footloose and fancy free and can do whatever you want and you still make good coin and here I am telling you to come with me to Tomales Bay and the only reason you are saying no is....."
"BECAUSE I CAN"T STAND THE HORROR RESORT ANY LONGER NOT EVEN FOR A MOMENT!"
But imagine that. Someone envying being me. The Icelandic gene decoder Viking man, at that. I've never run across that before.
posted by Anonymous @ 1:28 PM
1 Comments:
WOW - you a quite the writer. So eloquent and descriptive. Just happened upon this.
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