And yet again, I find out belatedly that I'm not quite usual/normal.

Never would have occured to me to go to a conference/whatever, without a specific goal and plan in mind. I actually find it annoying when I have to miss one of the presentations I want because it conflicts with another one on my plan. Or when there's a period in the conference where there isn't a presentation that aligns with my plan.

The last conference I went to, I was looking for both BI and scalability. Third session rolled around, there were presentations on DR/BC, T-SQL tuning, something about dealing with salespeople (if I remember correctly), and a few others. But nothing BI or scalability. Frustrated me. (So I went to the T-SQL tuning presentation, and ended up teaching the presenter how deadlocks are resolved and how lock escalation works. Not a total waste of time, but was still frustrating that I wasn't on-plan.)

I just assumed everyone else was doing something comparable.