My New Toastmaster Friend and My Longtime Friend

I invited one of Toastmaster associates to lunch some time back and we were finally able to meet yesterday. We share an IT background and figured it was a good enough reason to meet and discuss our personal perspectives. Found out he likes to talk as much as I like to listen. Even though I did not get to speak much, it was enough to make stimulating conversation. He was obviously proud of his achievements as an entrepreneur. He'd followed the MS Windows world in his career just as I had so I could relate to his enthuisiasm for the management tools that were developing for that environment.

He was much more optimistic about Microsoft and its product offerings as I'd gotten into it much earlier and have seen more dissapointments. Perhaps age has made more skeptical as I representated a generation of IT people at least one or two decades before his. So I listened to understand what I could about his joy of being a geek and mine for being less geek-like that could possible develop into common ground. My focus was more from a user perspective and serve more a translator or technology guide than being embedded into the technology. I told him it was interesting how he picked up on some of my speech into his. I'd mentioned in my speech the transition I made to the IT world from manufacturing as he was born into it.

During the entire lunch he continued to spew out ideas for future speech topics as I ate and listened. They were ideas I not only agreed with about technology but areas which I felt were the happening or going to happen in the near future. The changes in economy, the baby-boomer factor in this and drivers that move very quickly because of technology we were developing for people and organizations.

I'd had similar conversations with a longtime friend who was also there and we've been having conversations atht we needed to enlarge our circles to not only develop common ground where we act on some of these ideas that we were coming up with. We agreed afterwards that we need to have more energii people like this around to help us move forward. It was exciting talk. It's stuff we want to bottle up, but no... that would not work. We need to realease it into our circle of friends.

Events are what we decided much earlier, would be the way for us to do what we do with gusto. We'd already started setting up places to meet at restaurants and coffee houses here in Bville. Saturday night most of the city shuts down and finding a place to go is real challenge. So next week we start with the events. We're' starting with snacks and a movie at a local coffee shop. We'll divide out time equally between the movie and face-to-face time.