Several years ago, I was working for a major airline catering company. They sent me to an international Oracle users conference. Oracle had gone all out and had installed hundreds of e-mail terminals throughout the conference location. All of the attendees were pre-installed on e-mail and there were mailing lists that would allow you to email the entire conference.
At the keynote, Larry Ellison opened by apologizing for missing the last user conference. He said that he had flown into town but had gotten food poisoning from eating on the airplane and could not attend the last conference.
After the keynote, I rushed to an email terminal and emailed the following message to the entire group:
"I work for the catering company that prepared the food that made Larry sick. One of two things happened. Either we were waiting for Oracle 6 to work properly so we could implement a quality control system, or “Damn, we missed. He’s still alive”.