Kevin Schofield spends some time with Bill Gates

Kevin Schofield On The Job

Flash back a couple of hours… mid-morning, Bill and I got into a brief but heated argument that ended by one of those “death by silence” things where we just stopped talking. Normally I would talk it out instead of letting it just hang there, but as we were coming up to Bill’s talk to students and I wanted to make sure I didn’t send him out on stage in a lousy mood, I let it go and just made myself scarce. But up until the point where we jumped into the car with the food, he and I hadn’t spoken in a couple of hours, we had unresolved stuff, and it was not pretty.

Bill immediately dove into the cheeseburgers with gusto and you could see him cheer up. Larry was sitting next to him, and I was sitting in the row behind them. Larry starts handing food back to me, and asks me if I want some fries — at which point Bill (clearly cheering up) says “yeah, have some - they’re good for you!” Which was funny and cute, but more importantly gave me the sign that things were thawing out and it was going to be ok. Postscript, for those who care: in the car ride from Morristown to New York City, when I had to brief him on Columbia, we picked up the argument again, talked it all out over about 15 minutes, came to an understanding and everything was cool from that point on.

There are some interesting stories on this blog by Kevin Schofield, a General Manager at Microsoft Research.