I found myself having agreed to travel to a technical/astronomical conference on Maui—the same one I attended during the passenger-jet attacks of 9/11 decades ago. This time my wife traveled with me. When initially invited, I begged off: my interests now are very much misaligned to the type of audience at such a conference. But the organizer seemed to be a follower of my work, and said, “Nah: come anyway: give it your best shot. Many of us could use a shock.”

The trip itself was long and tiring, involving many strange twists that aren’t worth the burden to elaborate. Other exhausted people—many familiar faces from my astronomy days—trickled into the venue in time for the conference to start.

My talk was scheduled for 10:25 on the first morning of the five-day conference: the second substantive talk, after introductions and preliminaries. My wife and I found seats in the auditorium along the back wall, but the air conditioning unit was dripping water on us at an accelerating rate, so we moved to the side near the front, where the angle to the screen wasn’t great. During an intro video that showed many photos of past scientists and engineers at blackboards and the like, my wife turned around (we were not able to sit side-by-side) to excitedly say that she saw her father in one of those photos (which I had missed).

Around that time, the organizer who had invited me started introducing the conference goals to the audience—throwing in a mention of the challenging talk coming up by Tom Murphy. Enough heads tilted my way to alert the guy next to me that I must be this Tom Murphy character. Intrigued, he asked in a whisper if I could give him a one-sentence synopsis of my talk. I won’t spoil the rest of this post by repeating what I said, but his response was a bit of a chortle and something about how impressive software was. Irked by the confident but—in my view—ignorant dismissal, I muttered that my message would probably sail right by most people in the audience.

At this point, my wife picked up on the tension and asked what I meant by the synopsis sentence I had offered. My clarification made her squirm as well, essentially saying that I was being ridiculous. At this point, I realized I shouldn’t let these local interactions derail my focus, and that I really ought to polish up the talk slides in the short time remaining. Reaching into my backpack to pull out the laptop, I worried about how much charge remained, and had to dig past all kinds of highly-uncharacteristic junk-food wrappers accumulated during my travels to finally retrieve the computer. Then I woke up.

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