A few years ago, I told a story of how Marketing messed up a bunch of PDC slides by “helpfully” expanding acronyms… into the wrong phrases. Today I got to see Marketing’s handiwork again, as they edited my talk description. (Oh, and psst, Marketing folks, you might want to link to the full list of PDC sessions from your Conference Tracks and Sessions page. Unless, of course, y’know, you don’t want people to know about it.)

For one thing, they stuck my name into the description of the talk, thereby drawing attention to me rather than putting the focus on the actual talk topic. Because I’m not there to be me. I’m there to give a talk. If I were just there to be me, the title would be “Raymond Chen reads the newspaper for an hour while listening to music on his headphones.”

(That’s why I don’t do interviews. Interviews are about the interviewee, and I don’t want to talk about me. People should care about the technology, not the people behind it.)

They also trimmed my topic list but stopped before the punch line.

… asynchronous input queues, the hazards of attaching thread input, and other tricks and traps …

The punch line was “… and how it happens without your knowledge.” After all, you don’t care about the fine details of a feature you don’t use. The point is that it’s happening behind your back so you’d better know about it because you’re using it whether you realize it or not.

They also took out the reference to finger puppets.