Groundhog Day, CA and Lex Luthor

Back in mid-February of this year, I almost attended a conference held in Sydney by technology vendor CA.

I say "almost" because I registered for the event, put it into my diary, and was fully planning to show up. However, like any daily news reporter, I am slave to the events of the day and occasionally the need to cover urgent breaking news destroys any existing plans I may have.

Such is the life of a modern-day hack.

I must note here that I am most perturbed that Clark Kent never seemed to have these sorts of issues in his own position at the Daily Planet. But then again, I don't have an arch-nemesis named Lex Luthor or an aversion to Kryptonite. Each to his own.

(Two other differences between us: Kent never had to use confusing phrases like "service oriented architecture". And I've never found Lois particularly attractive.)

Now let me return you to your regularly scheduled article flow.

On the day of the conference, CA sent me a text message reminding me to attend and even inviting me to get breakfast at 8am at the event. "How kind and slightly invasive," I thought to myself at the time.

Yesterday morning, however, I awoke to be greeted by the same message all over again, leading me to temporarily conclude that like weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) in the 1993 film Groundhog Day, I was being forced to live one day in my life, over and over again. Except without an annoying clock radio that plays that annoying "I've got you babe" song.

Groundhog day trailer:

Then the realist in me kicked in and I realised the more likely scenario was that someone at CA had mistakenly bulk spammed the mobile phones of previous registrants for the aforementioned conference in February.

Now, even though I have never attended that conference, some part of me is convinced that CA Expo 2007 must have been a memorable day in Sydney. After all, I have all this electronic prompting to assure me of its existence. And as I have attended many conferences in my reporter role, I can easily find and switch in a generic set of memories to fill in the blanks of my CA experience.

Later on, CA contacted me again by SMS. "CA client," they wrote, dispelling any impression of intimacy between this large corporation and this humble reporter, "message sent earlier regarding CA Expo was due to a technical error by our SMS service provider. Please accept my apologies."

So much for those happy memories.