I went to a business social yesterday – my 1st one – usually I’m more than happy to just code at home with my PC and Pandora, but they did mention hors dourves and a bar, so I figured I’d give it a shot (although I had to pay to drink ARGH!).

Anyway, I struck up a conversation with some dude that turned out to be in sales – I still don’t know what he was doing there besides handing out his card to everybody, but at least he knew all the catch phrases I find oh so dear… He kept my attention for a solid 30 seconds until he started talking about Flash this, and Flash that – at which point I knew it was time for a refill or I was just gonna have to get out of this waste of time get-together.

Knowing me, I opted for one more drink, which meant that now I have to talk to one more potential idiot in the room. Hmm, which one will it be? Ah there’s somebody over by the sliced bread and pate. We had the usual initial banter that so many people love to waste time doing, and then I made the comment that I had seen some of his company’s work out on the net – oh, he loved hearing that. What he didn’t know is that I use Firefox and saw that big fat red X pop up on my status bar when I landed on his work before – meaning his site didn’t validate. How do I remember that? Easy: there are only two other companies in town that produce error free websites, and they both don’t set a meeting without the understanding that the fee will be at least $2,000 going forward. Highway robbery I tell ya!

I did say something about asking less for web projects than what others in the area have been doing and that my websites never have any coding errors, and that’s when he let the cat out the bag: “Errors? What’s errors? I’m sure we have errors, it’s all about presentation!” AGHHH! Of course, that immediately had me thinking of the earlier guy and his Flash fetish, so I knew I was in the wrong crowd and just split.

So, in my first meeting with other local web guys, I realized right away that they have no idea what standards or error control are all about.

After checking out a Meetup group just now from another person I met there, I figured this would be a great chance to start my own group of fellow standardistas, but Meetup wanted me to pay them for it – screw that! I’ll just blog about it via one of my other ‘local’ blogs and see where it goes…