#storm-summit — Public Fediverse posts

Sometimes you speak, sometimes you take notes, sometimes it rains

LISBON

For most of Wednesday, my calendar looked exceedingly odd: In the middle of a conference with a overwhelmingly packed agenda, it was blank that day. That was not the fault of Web Summit’s organizers, its attendees or myself, but of the weather.

With forecasts calling for Storm Charles to hit Lisbon with torrential rains and winds hitting 99 mph, the city government closed schools and canceled non-essential services in advance. Web Summit’s organizers followed their lead and announced Tuesday evening that day two of the event would not happen, erasing one panel I was set to moderate from my own calendar.

I’m used to rainouts in baseball but not at conferences. This one left me and every other Web Summit attendee with an entire day to do nothing or anything. And I had forgotten just how freeing that could feel.

I slept in until after 8 a.m. (somehow, this trip hasn’t had jet lag waking me up in the middle of the night for hours), had a leisurely breakfast in the hotel restaurant, returned to my room, and opened my laptop to start catching up on writing to a soundtrack of pouring rain.

I had my first nap sometime mid-morning, then resumed work on a post that was already showing signs of growing to absorb all the time I now had. I filed that a little before 1 p.m., started work on a second, longer story, and finally had a light lunch after 2 at a bakery close enough to be under the hotel’s awning.

It was still raining, but the winds didn’t seem that bad at all.

After a postprandial nap, I filed that second piece a little before 5 and after the skies had cleared. The forecast turned out to be fortuitously inaccurate, with the storm losing enough strength to arrive as nothing worse than what I might see at home on a summer afternoon.

Hours after other conference speakers had adjourned to bars, I started work on a third story… after yet another nap. Having nothing imminently due is an excellent way to realize the sleep debt you’ve accumulated.

I filed that last piece just after 8 and then finally left the hotel to get dinner and then meet up with other attendees at an event the organizers had put back on the schedule. You could fairly argue that I could have made more of the preceding 12 hours than file almost 3,000 words of copy, but a near-zero-distraction workday can still be a treat in its own right.