Breakage

Twofer today...I guess the wire post brought it up.

I lost a friend. And I pretty much deserved to I guess. I have not really "lost" other friends over the years, but more or less misplaced them. Mostly, once we moved, the two-way street of communication just didn't continue and I lost touch with them. They are still very important to me. There is not a single day I don't think about them and there is not a single one that if they called today and needed me I would not be there for them. No matter what. Mike, Joey, Chuck, Ron, Jim and Steve, you all know who I'm talking about here.

There have been a few times in my life, where to be quite frank I have just lost my ever-lovin' mind. I mean really. That something inside my head just snapped and the aftermath of those times are very hazy to me.

I had always wondered about the "snapped" analogy and when I actually dwell on the subject and the time, I can actually feel that something (not sure what) in my head just gave way. That the pressure build up was so terrible and once that snap happened all that pressure and all the stress just melted away. It seemed that those happened when I was least in control of my life, I guess. That in some way I was trapped and the only way out was just to walk away. And walk away I did. And it cost me.

Tony was a friend from back home. We started working together and became great friends. He was one of the few guys that I really got along with, we were unix guys, and computer guys, and in the early days of the I-bahn we were always on the bleeding edge. When he moved to CO, I wasn't too far behind in finding a job out here too. And we stayed in close touch and spent a great deal of our off time drinking and partying.

Tony moved on again to WA to work for Boeing, and found he could start his own consulting business. He was not much for working for someone else and had the drive to run his own show. Then he fell into a contract in NY working for Xerox. He needed help and the money was pretty good, so he called me.

The task was monumental. Xerox had no centralized datacenter for processing. If a group needed hardware or software, they would request it and run the system from underneath someone's desk. Our just was to bring it all in-house into a central datacenter and keep it running. The team of Unix guys grew to enormous proportions, but in the end there were only 3 of us: myself, Tony and BradG, that tackled the problems or did the oncall rotation.

My contract was for 6 months, by the end of month 2 I had worked nearly 4 months of my time. I had not been paid as yet and the pressure was relatively high. We had just gone through a series of meetings with Sun Microsystems, where to be honest it degenerated into who has the biggest tech dick in the room. Tony and I won that one. And finally to twist them enough to get them to do what we wanted, Kate the Xerox VP, showed them the amount of on-site staff supplied by Sun that we didn't have for the 12 e10k's we had. Tony, Brad and I were doing that work also.

OK, no readers digest version there. So it turned out one week, I was oncall, Brad and Tony were out of pocket and by that I mean, not even a cell phone or pager contact. We had problems with the E10k's and some systems, that I had in my 2 months not even touched. The days dragged on and the nights too since i was not getting much sleep at all. I needed to get a hold of one of those guys but couldn't. And then SHE was there. The hell-bitch that was our nemesis in all things.

I can't remember HB's name, but I could paint a picture if I had too. I don't even remember the interaction I had with her or the multitple time we had it out over those days. For once in my life, I felt incompetent and I really just could not handle that. It all built up and one day, I got a call from and old friend offering me a job. So, I quit, that day.

In my brain, it was so simple. In a way, it was like Bill Murray in 'Stripes' trying to escape from boot camp. Pack up, check out of the hotel, get in the car and go. And that is what I did. I walked off the job. I called and left messages with Tony and Brad, I packed my shit and left. I was pissed at them, basically they were out of contact so fuck'em, I will quit by leaving a voicemail. In the end, it was not the cool thing to do. Tony called and tried to get me back there to fix it all. I had hurt his reputation. And that is how it ended. I really didn't remember much until I was trying to replay it all in my head. I guess it doesn't matter.

What matters is I miss Tony. I have tried to contact him and mend it all but it has fallen on deaf ears. I don't blame him really, I would probably be in the camp. It is a lesson I learned and that I carry with me.

Oh the Wire thing. Tony used to say that all the time...So writing the wire post just brought it all back to me and I just felt like I needed to get it down somewhere.

Kol