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+---
+title: 'Hail Fellow, Almost Met'
+date: '2007-01-09T08:32:00-05:00'
+permalink: /hail-fellow-almost-met/
+tags:
+    - blogging
+    - conferences
+---
+
+An MLA moment I haven’t written about, as yet: I had three and a half minutes between meetings, at one point, and so I grabbed the laptop and headed for the corridor in the conference center, where there was a nice strong free wifi signal. Just as I was sitting down and getting myself set up, along came a guy in a very nice suit and a very nice open-collared shirt in a lovely shade of green. Perhaps I looked a bit familiar for some reason, perhaps it was the usual conference name-tag scan, perhaps it was the sight of me yanking laptop out of messenger bag, but the guy in the lovely green shirt gave me a decided squint as he passed by. I thought nothing of it for about thirty seconds, and then realized — I think that was [Michael Bérubé](http://www.michaelberube.com).
+
+I’m still not positive — I’ve never met the man in person. And of course, I left Philadelphia before the big blogging panel, so I couldn’t confirm then. Nor could I introduce myself, which is something I really wanted to do. He did me a quite astonishing professional favor some years back, one utterly unnecessary, particularly given that *he had no idea who I was*. It fell at a key moment in my career, when things were looking more than a little dark, and I’ve never gotten the chance to thank him in person, or to let him know how much it meant.
+
+And now things have gone all explody over at Le Blogue Bérubé. Once upon a time, at least, we both belonged to a fairly small cohort of academics with the same weird tendency to publish our random thoughts online. Now he’s gone, and I’m just me again. I can’t help but feel like I missed my moment.
+