Text:

When traveling from Toronto's Pearson Airport to the U.S. you clear customs before you get on the plane. I don't fly that often but I recognized the customs agent as I approached the counter. He had on his typical stonewall face and I was slightly nervous as I approached thinking of how Canadian citizens may be perceived as stealing work from U.S. citizens. I was traveling to the 2005 Firefox Summit for the work Radiant Core did on Firefox 2.0 and had marked off "business" as my purpose for traveling south of the border.

"Are you traveling on business?" he asked. "Yes" I responded. "I'm going to a software developers conference". "What's the name of the software conference?" he said. "The Firefox Summit. It's for a web browser" I answered. "Did you get paid working for Firefox?". I hesitated for a moment. "Uh, yes. We were a contractor". I waited for the barrage of questions to follow about the details surrounding how I came to work on Firefox.

"Firefox? Is that Mozilla Firefox?" as he looked at me with a slightly less guarded tone. "Yes" I said with a bit of surprise. "Man I use that all the time!" he exclaimed. "You know that new search box. I love that with the new glow and the drop down suggestions. I use it all the time.". "Thanks" I said, "we helped out with the look and feel of it including the new search controls. It's really great".

For the next few minutes the agent and I batted our favourite parts of Firefox 2.0 back and forth while the lineup of Canadian citizens slowly started to grow. A cheerful stamp was punched onto my customs card and I was happily waved on my way. Needless to say the trip through customs was the most painless I'd ever experienced, all thanks to Firefox!

Source:

Online Story Form, Mozilla Digital Memory Bank

Categories:

• contributor story: Objects that were contributed to the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank via the online story submission interface.
  

Citation:

Michael Glenn, Mozilla Digital Memory Bank, Object #963, 17 November 2006, <http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=963> (accesed 9 April 2021)