But this particular cabby wanted this particular woman to pay in advance. And suddenly, she was transformed from a tired business traveler learning about Notes administration into a second class citizen. She was so upset. You could see this touched a chord in her, because as the debate raged (eventually to include the cabby, some workers from the taxi stand, and even a Newark airport cop), she got progressively more angry and hurt.

Denise and I did nothing. We just stood there. Denise had an expression of shock on her face. I was a mere spectator. The entire event didn't fully register. I just wanted to go home. Part of me was even annoyed that this was taking place because it was keeping me from getting to my cab as quickly as I wanted.

But as I sat stalled in traffic the next day, motoring three hours to meet my family for Thanksgiving dinner, the scene replayed itself in my mind's eye. Apparently, the recording camera operating somewhere in my cerebellum was substantially more functional at the airport than the rest of my mind, because I could recall the entire scene with almost crystal clarity.

I could recall what she was wearing. I could see clearly the bright green and muted brown colors of her clothing and even the fire-engine red of the book. I could recall her shoes, her coat, and even how it hung on her frame. But most of all, vividly, I could recall, I could see in my mind, the despair showing in her eyes. Outwardly, there was fury. This was a woman who was unjustly insulted. But inwardly, she was hurting terribly. And I keep seeing her eyes.

There's a lot we don't know. We don't know whether she was singled out because she was an African American woman, whether it was because of where she wanted to go, or for some other reason. Most probably, she was singled out for this treatment by the immigrant cabby with a thick accent because she was a black woman.

I spend most of my time in relative isolation from the real world. If I live anywhere, it's on the Internet, where faces and, in particular, eyes can't be seen. Yet here I was, immersed in absolute reality, where a stranger was being hurt. But she wasn't a stranger. She was a Notes administrator. She may have been someone who sent me mail. She may have been someone who was at Lotusphere last year with me. She may well have been one of our readers. She was one of us.

The hurt in her eyes probably would have haunted me even if we didn't share the tribal affiliation of being members of the Lotus administrator community, a sect of technical cognoscenti. Yet, I think it registered so strongly simply because she was one of us.

I've run this scene through my head a dozen times since. Even if Denise and I weren't so tired, I'm not sure how we could have helped. We couldn't have offered her our cab, since we were later in line and probably going somewhere different. Offering to pay for her cab wouldn't have helped the situation and might have insulted her further. Inviting her to write for DominoPower would have been completely insensitive. So I'm not sure how we could have helped, and instead we would have just added to the cluster of chaos. But we were there and one of our own was being hurt.