You know what goes through your mind. The hassle. The expense. The cowardice and selfishness of the person who hit it and then didn't bother to leave a note. I was, as they say, fit to be tied.
I was still fuming about it that evening when I was watching the news on TV. Until, that is, I watched a mother and father being interviewed about their daughter being struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver. She was 14.
I was, rightfully, even more angry at myself than I had been at the person who put a dent in my car. A stupid dent. It was a pretty good reminder of how important it is not to sweat the small stuff.
It's a reminder that a lot of people in Massachusetts would do well to ponder. Especially today, as Louis Gutierrez assumes his position as the state's CIO and takes a seat that had gotten too hot for his predecessor, Peter Quinn, who resigned last month.
What stoked the fire under that seat was, of all things, Massachusetts' plan to adopt the XML-based OpenDocument format as a standard for saving files. To give you an idea of what's at stake here, Sun's StarOffice productivity suite and IBM's Workplace support OpenDocument; Microsoft Office does not.
Massachusetts is the first major government entity in the U.S. to launch an OpenDocument plan -- a troubling precedent for Microsoft and others who oppose the format. So, what was supposed to be a healthy debate on technology standards collapsed into a tawdry political battle. And Quinn, who was leading the OpenDocument charge, found himself in the political cross hairs. It got to the point where an investigation was launched into out-of-state trips taken by Quinn to speak at technology conferences, prompted by questions from The Boston Globe about the propriety of such trips. When it was over, the Globe reported that Quinn was found to have done nothing wrong. But by then Quinn had had it.
"Enough is enough," Quinn told Computerworld's Carol Sliwa in a recent interview. The investigation "definitely took its toll on me from a personal standpoint and a family standpoint."
Now it's Gutierrez in the spotlight. A 2002 Computerworld Premier 100 honoree and a widely respected IT leader, this guy is a class act. A lot of my colleagues and I have had the pleasure of working with him on a number of occasions over the past several years, and I can tell you there's just no finer gentleman or more capable IT professional who could have been called upon to serve at such a turbulent time.
If anyone can calm things down and get Massachusetts' IT priorities back on track, it's Gutierrez. His calm, reasoned bearing, his intellect and his demonstrated capacity to build consensus (Gutierrez oversaw the development of the state's highly praised Virtual Gateway online portal, which integrated information from the disparate systems of 16 state agencies) will serve him and the state's residents well.
With Gutierrez in his new position, other state governments will have any number of reasons to emulate Massachusetts. Sweating over a dent-in-the-Miata file format shouldn't be one of them.