I fell in love in France a few years ago. Just like I fell in love in Dallas and Atlanta and New Orleans, even Chicago.

Sometimes it's a restaurant. Sometimes just a peculiar local brew. Often it is a view, or a building or a statue. Once or twice it's been the music and always it's the company--you can't fall in love with a city alone. But stuff happens. Supercomm, for example, moves out of Atlanta. A hurricane destroys New Orleans. And Dallas, well, Dallas will always be Dallas. That'll never change.

As for France, but for scheduling problems I would have been there this week for TeleManagement World, in Nice, soaking up the culture, shopping in the fresh fruit market, playing chess with my friend Chris, the bartender at O'Reilly's--the only Irish bar I could find in nearby Cannes. It was a stink hole, but the chess was good, and the beer. I should have been dining at Le Tire Bouchon or La Mere Germaine's or sitting in the park between the Le Meridien Hotel and the Beau Rivage looking at the sea or watching kids and old ladies with babushkas ride the carousel. I should have been well on my way to taking up smoking again. Everyone does it there, and there is the only place I miss it.

And oh yes, I should have been covering the event. Big news there in Nice this week for the OSS crowd--and the BSS crowd for that matter. I got a sneak peak at it and it showed up on the pages of Telephony on Monday. The full story is below, but in summary it said roughly this: "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah." I think that's French for "Holy cow! The TMF kept itself relevant for at least 10 more years."

Check it out. TMF President Martin Creaner is really shaking things up over there. He has formally merged the worlds of OSS and BSS. Well, he set the stage for it, anyhow. The rest will take some work.

Funny how things like that happen...two entities that seem to fit together so well, that seem like they should always have been together but started out on separate paths years ago only to find each other as a result of the Telecom Act introducing competition and the Internet introducing IT. Before you knew it, this steady, reliable old telecom software infrastructure got its world rocked by something younger, smarter and in the words of one ex-TMF president: sexier. It'll never be the same. But it will always be better for it.

IT technology, the heart of telecom business support systems (BSS), will rejuvenate the back office now that the two are working closely together, hand in hand, the way they were meant to. It doesn't always work out that way. But it's good when it does.

I'll be in Stamford next week. What are the odds of finding something memorable there? I don't even know what the state of Connecticut is known for, besides being Number 2 to Massachusetts in the number of times it is misspelled.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@telephonyonline.com.