We all sat down a couple of nights back to work on a hack - the Debt-o-Matic. But for spo0nman to have not written "I am going out of the country" in that entry, he would have had to be clairvoyant. He was headed for Euro-OSCON 2006 to talk about Nagios and about monitoring servers easily. Something he's thoroughly qualified to talk on, having done it day in & day out in the trenches, the on-call hard-hat in place, with a pager in one hand and laptop in other.
But right now, instead of packing his bags for his flight, he's in Delhi sweating it out (yeah, it is hot today) at Freedel with the rest of ILUG-D. With a visa, tickets blocked, hotels booked and yet he's not going to be on a flight tonight, polishing up his slides for the talk.
Nobody can force anybody else to pay up, but when an offer to pay for the tickets out of his own pocket is rejected, it repels me to even speculate about the reasons behind the rejection. If there is a financial crunch and the budget is trim, I can understand denying sponsorship for an employee going overseas. But if your own hard earned money isn't good enough to fix this, I don't know what is.
All said and done, the flight starts in 6 odd hours from now and he still hasn't got any tickets, despite the offer to pay for it from his own pocket. Personally I'd be happy to add my month's savings to that kitty as well, mainly because it is a matter of principle. A direct NO for the proposal at the outset would've been acceptable, but such a tease hurts like nothing else.
In all probability, his blocked tickets have expired by now and cannot be issued. And any attempt to escalate the issue will also probably have to wait till monday morning, which is when Euro-OSCON kicks off. All of which leaves hardly any point in the standard "Patience, my friend" from the-system-works-but-slowly department. Truly, sometimes justice delayed can be justice denied.
But the corollary to all this is even scarier. After all, if it could happen to him, it can happen to me. Go forward a few hypothetical months, substitute me for him and LCA for Euro-OSCON ... you get the point.
In conclusion - WTF !!!! ?.
--The average nutritional value of promises is roughly zero.