Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Friday 15/03/2002

A plaintive cry is heard from Hannover. It is erstwhile colleague Guy Kewney, who has been covering things like CeBIT for 25 years or so. They won't let him in, because they don't believe he's a journalist. They don't believe he's a journalist because he doesn't have a copy of the magazines he writes for with him: that he's got a Web presence as big as the Moon cuts no ice -- Web journalists don't count -- and that it's 8am in London so he can't just get a fax from his editors also falls on stony ground. He can't get into the press room to pick up equipment left for him, he can't make his meetings: in short, he's beset by outrageous fortune.

Those of us who know Guy will do the sigh-heaving thing at this point. The man's ability to write fantastic, incisive stories just packed with experience and insight is matched only by his unerring instinct for getting into impossible situations where things Just Go Wrong in ways mere mortals cannot understand. There's even a technical term for it, the Kewney Disruption Field: it used to just act on computers and software, making them crash as soon as he got near, but it's clearly expanding its remit into the rest of the known universe.

He should be home by now, but I'm keeping an ear on air traffic control for London -- if there's a mayday call from a pilot battling with a Boeing 737 that's gone completely haywire and seems to be playing Tetris with the flight management computer, I'll know the reason why...

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