At the shoe shine stand on Friday, the workers busily buffed and chatted with customers. When I mentioned I worked in Information Technology, the shoe-shine guy bragged he had just flown back on the red-eye from the O’Reilly Emerging Technology (ETech) conference in San Diego.
How was the conference? “Great, I was amazed at how much fun everyone had,” he gushed. “Especially those alpha geeks, the scraggly guys with Apple laptops.” I gave him a skeptical look. “All the beautiful people were there, but I was disappointed to miss the rock star who got the death threat,” he intoned with a visible wince. Could that be Kathy Sierra? “Yeah,” he marveled, “she writes a wonderful world-class weblog.”
What’s the buzz on emerging technology? “To be honest, we non-geeks had no idea what the alpha geeks were talking about. But the geeks grokked each other and their stuff looked pretty cool,” he confided as he stroked the final buff. I handed him a wad of cash including a generous tip. Deftly straightening the rumpled bills, he whispered, “I have an even better tip for you: Buy Google stock.”
Pondering this surreal encounter, I felt as though I had passed through a time machine and landed on Wall Street in 1928, six decades before alpha geeks roamed the planet. Back then, Joseph Kennedy, Sr. spoke these prophetic words: “You know it is time to sell when the shoe-shine boy tries to give you stock tips.”