Picture this scene:
I had just passed my CCIE R/S and was taking the family to Great Wolf Lodge. The first day was awesome, and full of much-needed family time. The morning of the second day, I was lying in bed waiting for the kids to wake up, when I get a message from Katherine McNamara, (www.network-node.com) that said, “Hey don’t be mad”. My eyebrow raised. Who opens with, “Don’t be mad” with good news to follow?
She linked me to a GoFundMe she had created for me. “Help Send Tim to Cisco Live!”
My eyes bulged and my heart skipped a beat. My face flushed with embarrassment. People crowdfund stuff like medical bills (and don’t get me started on the insanity of that). They crowdfund funeral expenses. They crowdfund important things. And here I was on a crowdfund site being crowdfunded to travel to Cisco Live. I admit, my first response was not thankful. I was mortified.
“Don’t worry”, said Kat. “We did this last year for JP (www.xtremeie.com) and it worked out great.”
I nervously accepted the help. I really wanted to go. Kat had an Imagine pass (that she had bought herself) she was going to give me because her customer had requested she attend Live, and so she had been given a full attendee pass.
At this point I need to add that this was not her idea completely. Dustin Schuemann, one of the RouterGods (www.meetup.com/routergods) leadership had actually floated my name as a suggestion for this originally. Dustin and I met on RouterGods, in fact, we were both at about the same point in our CCIE studies at the time and synced up on labs, talked in our Ryver channel, etc.
I spent part of the day splitting my attention between my phone and my family, watching the GoFundMe, before stopping. This was a vacation. I brought my family to GWL to focus on them, not anything else. But it was tough.
That night I caught up. It was already mostly funded! Katherine had offered to write blog posts on her incredibly popular security blog in exchange for donations over a certain amount, and as a testament to her popularity, it skyrocketed. By the second day, it was funded completely. People I knew donated, some I didn’t know, and some people I would have never imagined.
