Last week Madrid hosted the first Ibero-American Young Water Professionals conference.
My plan was to attend Wednesday and Thursday: two days of a packed agenda, hotel booked and registration paid. Around 400 euros spent before I even left home.
As some of you already know, I never made it on Wednesday. The train accident happened very close to me.
There were plenty of tickets in that lottery, and luckily mine wasn’t drawn that day. I missed the whole Wednesday programme.
That afternoon I genuinely hesitated. Was it worth carrying on just for Thursday, or was the sensible thing to go back home? In the end the bus came up to rescue at a reasonable time. I got to Madrid at six, ate what I hadn’t eaten all day, and rested.
Thursday wasn’t going to be complete either: the only ticket I could get home was a 5 pm bus. That left me the morning session, up to lunch, and the panel I was moderating.
On Wed afternoon I posted a video on social media when I realised that nobody seemed to be aware that a third train had theoretically been very close to another collision.
The video went viral, reaching around 5–6 million views across all platforms within 24 hours.
Spanish media flooded my inbox, and on Thursday night, as soon as I got home, I had the opportunity to join one of my favourite TV programmes.
Here’s the interview in Spanish if you want to hear the full story behind it.
Half a conference. And still, as almost always with these events, I came back with far more than I expected.
I watched someone in their twenties present an AI he had built himself..that gave me plenty of ideas and, more importantly, a clear feeling that I'm on the right track with my own AI learning journey: both through our water-focused course and the new enterprise-level programme I've enrolled in.
And then came my own panel. It was the last slot before lunch, right after a session where half the room was scrolling their phones. We set out to win their attention back, and we did.