Saturday, October 29, 2005
Bill Gates
My company organized an event last week for Bill Gates, who came into town briefly to promote Microsoft-Jordan and the technology initiatives the King has been working on for the last few years. The event was nice and Bill Gates was not bad. He gave a 12 minute rah-rah speech about what the technology of the future was going to look like, and how he was happy that Jordan understood the importance of technology in the global marketplace.
But what I thought was the most interesting aspect of the event was the fact that it was held at 4:30pm on a day in Ramadan. So the audience, who hadn't eaten or drank a thing the entire day, was forced to sit through 45 minutes of speeches before they could eat. The problem was that they had to sit there with a full spread set before them on the table. Plates of food and glasses of juice and water tempted them through the entire event. They couldn't break their fast until 5:20pm, iftar time. Much more interesting than Bill Gates' speech was watching these folks being literally tortured by the spread before them and thinking there was no way they could pay attention to the Minister of Technology even Bill Gates. I hadn't eaten since breakfast and I was starving. It was all a very impressive test of will.
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But what I thought was the most interesting aspect of the event was the fact that it was held at 4:30pm on a day in Ramadan. So the audience, who hadn't eaten or drank a thing the entire day, was forced to sit through 45 minutes of speeches before they could eat. The problem was that they had to sit there with a full spread set before them on the table. Plates of food and glasses of juice and water tempted them through the entire event. They couldn't break their fast until 5:20pm, iftar time. Much more interesting than Bill Gates' speech was watching these folks being literally tortured by the spread before them and thinking there was no way they could pay attention to the Minister of Technology even Bill Gates. I hadn't eaten since breakfast and I was starving. It was all a very impressive test of will.
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