Wow, so here I am, still in shock at the news I received this evening. State of Search ran a competition for a chance to win a free ticket to SES San Francisco by simply following them on Twitter and retweeting “RT @state_ofsearch State of Search is giving away a ticket to SES San Francisco, follow & win the ticket by retweeting!” which I duly retweeted on Tuesday.
Anyway, I’d had a busy day at work today as usual and no time to check my mail or tweets. Out of the office windows we all witnessed our very own Manchester monsoon and the rain did not let up at all, it was a pretty awesome spectacle.
Left work at 5.40pm, ran as fast as I could manage to my car as it was still chucking it and didn’t get close to home until 7pm. Streets were flooded, drove through 3 feet of dirty water, saw a couple of accidents and the police had cordoned off my area of the street so there was no way of getting home. The BBC say Stockport and Cheadle Hulme were worst hit by the rain. I kind of live right in between these two areas, in Cheadle.
As I couldn’t get any further home, I pulled over, chilled and checked my emails. I received an email off Bas van den Beld who said that I’d been chosen by Dave Naylor as the winner of the ticket to SES San Francisco and to contact him within half an hour to confirm otherwise they’d have have to give the ticket to someone else due to such short notice. I checked the time of the email – 4.30pm. I freaked out. Another email from Bas, the time was half an hour later, this time saying that I hadn’t responded and that they will have to pick another winner and apologies. I screamed.
Frantic, I emailed back explaining my situation and tried desperately to access twitter though Hootsuite on my iPhone, to get hold of Bas and State of Search and whoever I could. My iPhone was just slowly dying on me and freezing at times, it’s been extremely slow recently, what the hell is wrong with it?!! Figuring there was nothing more I could do, I found a small side road and managed to head back home to sulk.
Just as I was about to give up hope, I got a direct message through Twitter off Bas saying that I was in luck and could go! I couldn’t believe it.
I’ll be heading to SES San Francisco which will be held next week. There’s so much going on and some amazing speakers there it’s going to be an awesome event. Fortunately I have family in San Francisco so I’ll be staying with them for the duration.
So there you go. My first ever SEO event – excited is an understatement! I’d firstly like to thank Dave Naylor for choosing me as the winner and secondly to State of Search for giving me this wonderful opportunity, I’m so, so grateful.
I’ll keep you posted. :)
Julie, that’s amazing!!! im very jealous! Make sure you take lots of pictures, as blog like crazy!