Is That?..... No, It Can't Be

I had a great time. A wonderful time. Capped off by something I could never have imagined would happen to me.

I saw The Who tonight, with The Greg Kihn Band opening. Greg Kihn did "a medley of our hit." I’ve heard him as the morning DJ on KFOX in San Jose, and I know he doesn’t take himself too seriously. And The Who was everything I expected them to be. Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend still have it. They did a lot of the songs I’ve heard through the years, including some from before I was born. After almost 40 years of doing hard rock (only now we’d call it "classic rock"), they still have the capacity to impress.

Afterward, I was sitting in the parking lot with the friends who took me, waiting for traffic to thin out a little. To our left were three people on Segways, running around and showing off. Since we weren’t going anywhere soon, I decided to get out and take a closer look.

I carefully walked up to them, excused myself into their conversation, and asked to have a closer look. The guy I was talking to jumped right in and started to show it to me… and then offered to let me ride it.

I got a good look at his face, and thought, "Is that… That looks like Steve Wozniak." Then I realized he was too well-dressed. Everything I’ve known about Woz is that he is super-casual, and very laid-back. This guy wasn’t quite casual enough, although he was certainly having fun.

So I gingerly stepped onto the Segway, and felt it rock back and forth underneath my feet. Typical for the new Segway user, they told me. Nothing to be embarrassed about. I got to do some back-and-forth, and I learned how to turn it around corners and make it spin in place. It’s a fun contraption, and I wouldn’t mind having one.

As I stepped off and moved away a little bit, a woman standing nearby asked me quietly, "Do you know who that is?"

I said, "That isn’t Dean Kamen, is it?"

She said, "No," and gave me a "surely you know who this is" look.

I said, "That’s W–" I was half afraid to say the name, thinking I would be wrong.

She looked at me and nodded. And then she said, "But you didn’t hear that from me."

You mean I got my very first demonstration of a Segway from Steve Wozniak himself?!? This is the man who made my career possible! This is the man who invented desktop computing!

This is the man who put a great big grin on my face!

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