How much more of an irony can there be, when you see a network outage causing almost an hour’s worth of delay at a Networker’s event! Cisco Live certainly did not start off on the right note. Being my first visit to the conference, I did not have a benchmark to base my comparisons on, but the place did seem a little empty, perhaps more because it was a beautiful day outside in San Diego and Sunday was never a good day to be inside, especially when the sun was out.

It’s funny how the geographical clock never works well with its biological counterpart. When on one side of the country I snoozed my alarm at 5:00am to go back to sleep, I was already awake on the other side wondering why my alarm hadn’t gone off yet. The San Diego Convention Center was just a block and a railway line away from the hotel where I stayed. In a city whose major revenue came from conferences, this place was indeed a majestic galleria.

Fine looking ladies dressed in blue welcomed us at the entrance of lobby D. “Ambassadors” as they were tagged at the back, directed me to the registration desk, where the fun was lurking amidst the crowd. I was happy to be one of the first few in the line. But my happiness did not last long, when I saw the faces on the other side of the counter. Network outage was what I heard from my fellow networkers in the line. And everyone of them had the smile of an irony in their faces as they said that. The wait was a bit longer than expected. But fortunately a group of “black cats” (NOC engineers) emerged from nowhere to fix the situation and we were back on track. Although it did take a little bit of hit on the program schedules, I must admit Cisco did a great job to recuperate and get things back running.

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