Do you know how to go from a bathroom stall in the

2025-10-01

Do you know how to go from a bathroom stall in the Microsoft Campus (yeah with a few adult tears) to platinum status in American Airlines, and get to travel the world teaching bleeding edge technology to amazing software developers? Easy. Stop crying, put your sh#$% together and keep working. As I told the story in my previous post, I was “set up” by the project manager (MS SME) as he found out the day before the big day of our presentation that things changed internally, so he threw me to the lions with his outdated-like-a-CD-in-a-teens-room content. Things didn’t go as expected, not my fault. I was just given bad source content which makes the garbage-in garbage-out mantra applies. Good content is something that’s always key in every training. But sometimes life gives you a second chance and this is one of those cases. I was asked to update all the presentations. This required getting the new-and-fresh-from-the-oven SQL Server content and re-delivered it. Learners liked it. More than that, they found it useful to complete their job and get stuff done. Microsoft extended the contract with ArtinSoft , and started an engagement called Route 64 where I was able to travel the world to all Microsoft technology centers (MTCs) and teach partners how to adopt 64-bit computing. We were working in conjunction with Intel Corporation and HP . The way that it worked is that we knew one or two weeks in advance where we were going to go, but not more. So when I left my house, I may travel to Korea, then the next week in Seattle, the next week I might be in Sweden, the next week I might be in India, there’s actually here a link so you see all the places that I’ve been: https://lnkd.in/e94BuQg7 That was a wonderful time in my life for several reasons. One of them, I was single so I could travel freely. Second, I got to see the world on Microsoft’s terms. And third, I had the experience of training a very diverse group of engineers from all around the world, which gave me the skills necessary to understand how to talk in front of people in public. Public speaking is a great, great skill, but if you take those skills and move them into video training, then you can scale out. So anyway, that’s part of my story of how I learned how to be a public speaker and a trainer. In the upcoming posts I’ll tell you about how we delivered training worldwide, with computers as big as small refrigerators.