star struck

Yes, it happened to me.

This past Monday, 15 September I walked into one of USA TODAY's conference rooms for our standard 8:30 AM Circulation Marketing meeting where the Director, our VP and other managers meet to discuss ways to convince folks to subscribe to our paper. I was the first one in the room, one of our many conference rooms in our beautiful new corporate headquarters where I have had the privilege of working since January of 2002. My office is about 50 feet behind this conference room. But there was a man there setting up bright lights, a camera and a microphone. Turns out that in 90 minutes bono of u2 was going to come to this very room to be interviewed by USA TODAY editors. I even got to do a sound check on the mike for the guy!

bono was in town to "appeal to america's greatness" and to meet with President Bush about treating AIDS in Africa.

i will confess that I was a bit star-struck. I wasn't the only one. folks were standing around the glass-enclosed conference room watching the back of bono's head. a co-worker of mine just walked right up to him and shook his hand. it occurred to me how unusual it must be to be surrounded by such throughts and stratagems every day of your life.

but bono's message was an important one and he's been delivering it for a while now.

you can see clips from the interview by clicking "see it for yourself" in Whitney Matheson's column on the event.