Thunder of Wade

I write in my blog things that happen to me – hence the first person – but this entry is not about me.

Instead, I start off with an apology if this is the first you’ve heard of this – I tried to let people know in a more personal way, but didn’t have a way to contact everyone.  I have some terrible news… Jeff Pappa passed away last week.

I had been trying to reach him much of the week – I was supposed to take him to the airport for a job interview out of state and hadn’t heard back.  When his neighbors called me and told me that his mail was piling up in the mailbox and he didn’t answer his door, I called Jeff’s brother and asked if he or his siblings had heard from Jeff.  When they hadn’t, the landlord was contacted and so were the police.  They went into his apartment and found him.

The neighbor called me and I called Jeff’s brother – it was the worst phone call I’ve ever had to make.   He broke down and had to call me back.

I left work and went over to the apartment to try and help with the investigation, giving the detective and officers what I knew about Jeff’s medical history.  They were all very kind and supportive – I’m grateful for their compassion.

The medical examiners took Jeff’s body to their office for review and I tried to help his family as best I could – none of them are local and I know it must have been frustrating being so far away.

I stayed at the apartment until the detective was ready to leave – then I shut off lights and closed the door.

In the coming days there will be visiting hours and a funeral service.  His family will try to sort out the material parts of his life and we will all try to deal with our grief.

Jeff was my room-mate, my partner, my boyfriend – however you want to say – for nearly 8 years.  We lived together in that apartment until I moved out last December.  We were good for a long time – and then we fell apart.  And I know I hurt him terribly when I told him I wanted to end things.  Even after we were no longer a couple, we remained friends as best we could and I took care of him when he was sick.

Jeff seemed to have rallied in the past couple months and was looking forward to a new job and a new start.  His last post on Facebook was a complaint that he thought he was coming down with strep throat.   I don’t know the final report from the medical examiners office as to what finally took him from us, but I suspect it was that all that he had gone through in the past year finally taking it’s toll.

It’s snowing as I sit and write this – thinking about the time he and shared and going over the thousand things I could have done differently.

Jeff’s family is planning a service for him back in hometown this week.  I hope to have the final details today and anyone that wants to join me should contact me for times and directions.

There are more stories to tell, but those are for another day.   Those that knew Jeff, please keep his family in your thoughts.

I got a letter in the interoffice mail from the HR department.  Usually not a good sign, but this time it was an invite to the Annual Service Awards Reception.   Somehow, without really paying too much attention to it, I’ve manage to work here 15 years.

Kind of amazing.

I’m getting a small gift (not sure what that covers) and a certificate.  I’m guessing  there will also be snacks.

So, I’ve got to RSVP, make a note on my calendar, and remember to wear a tie that day.

15 years.   Dang.

I talked to my sister yesterday evening and she told me how she’d been feeling sick with a sinus infection.  Apparently, she coughed so hard that she actually cracked a rib.

I felt bad for her, but was also really impressed.  I knew she was a something of a bad-ass, but I didn’t realize she could manage a feat like that.  She went to the doctor who confirmed what had happened (she coughed and heard a loud “pop”, then was nearly incapacitated by the pain).

The doctor couldn’t wrap it since he wanted to her to cough up the gunk from her sinus infection.  He also couldn’t give her anything for it since she’s expecting.   So, she’s just had to tough it out.

Again, my hat is off to her.   Impressive.

I swam every day last week – rather than my usual three times a week – and on Friday I headed to the rec center.  It was busy and there are only two lanes for lap swimming.  One had two girls in it – one teaching the other to swim – and the other had a woman flailing about as she did her laps.  I hopped into her lane and when she got to my end I said hello and asked if I could share the lane.  She sighed, dramatically, and said “Fine,” in a way that made it clear that it was not fine.

At this point I would normally ask if the other person wanted to split the very narrow lane or rotate – keeping to the right. Instead, I decided to just try and stay out of her way – which proved to be tricky since she took her half of the lane out of the middle.  Did I mention she was flailing about?

Three laps in and the cranky woman and I are at opposite ends of the lane.  A girl asks if she can join us and I tell her sure, but that we’ll have to rotate the lane.  I swim down, meet up with the cranky woman, and  tell her that we’ve got a third joining us – and that we’ll have to rotate.

She responded, “Now that’s too much!  It was bad enough when you got in the lane, but she’s just going to have to swim outside the lane,”

I could have argued that I’ve seen 6 people politely share a lane.  Or that with the other pool closed, we just have to adapt.  Or I could have taken it to the lifeguard.

But, given my aversion to pointless conflict, I told her:

“Fine.  I’ll swim outside the lane,”

Then I ducked under the lane marker… and promptly realized that this wasn’t going to work.  The pool was just too crowded.  I thought for moment, then decided I’d done plenty of swimming that week and needed a break anyway.  She won – I got bitched out of the pool.

Fortunately, one of my friends invited me out to dinner and movie.  We went and saw “The Woman in Black”.  Plenty of “jump out of your seat moments” – and I was apparently channeling my inner little girl.  It was a little embarrassing – but a good change of pace from the cranky woman.   At least the cranky woman in the movie  – okay, the totally evil woman in the movie – had a good reason for being cranky.

The movie was good, though the ending was a little weak, and when my friend dropped me off at my house I was a little uneasy going in.   I guess that was the mark of a good scary movie.

Finally, I bought a clock for my bathroom the other day.  I was only $4.00 at Target.  It occurs to me that if Time is Money, it’s apparently not very much money.  I got a whole clock’s worth of time  for less than the cost of a chicken nugget meal at McDonalds.

I went for a swim after work yesterday since I had some time to kill before my appointment to get my taxes done.  I did 30 laps and felt really powerful in the water – like I belonged there.  When I was done with the swim, I got dressed and left the building – emerging onto strangely subdued Akron streets.

This is likely a combination of water in my ear muffling the sounds around me and some really delightful endorphins, but I felt… peaceful.  And calm.   Which for me is damn odd.

I went over to McDonald’s to grab a bite to eat and I was patient and relaxed.  Took the food back to the office to eat and listened to some music.

When I went to get my taxes done, I didn’t have to wait at all.  The tax preparer was friendly and efficient and impressed that I had all the required paperwork.  Took about 25 minutes to go through the whole thing and I’m getting a nice chunk of change back – and saved a bunch on fees.

Went home, played some video games and read a book.   Still relaxed and peaceful.

It was like the universe said, “okay, yeah, we’ve been rough on you.  Why don’t you just chill out for a bit and we’ll let it go this time, okay?”

Weird.  We’ll have to see how today goes.  I’m at work and I’m still pretty calm.   Wonder if there was something in the pool water?   If so, I need to bottle that stuff.

I went to a really awesome party not too long ago.  One of my friends was turning 40 and a small crew of party planning friends rented a cool historical building for the venue.   The snacks were great, the birthday cupcakes were rich, and the company was really fun.   I was part of the kazoo band to play Happy Birthday and we all got noise-makers.    One of the planners brought in balloons for us to inflate and make balloon animals.  I generally stick to the quieter medium of paper, but I decided it looked like fun and tried my hand at it.  I made a set of Cthulhu tentacles that also doubled as Medusa’s snake hair when adjusted.  Gives me some ideas for Halloween. Maybe. 🙂

The party started to wind down and I stayed to help put away chairs and clean up a bit. It was getting late and I was getting ready to go when my former room-mate asked if I would take him back to his apartment since he had lost a contact and couldn’t drive.  I agreed and then had the second worst car ride of my life – the first being when I had a massive migraine and thought my brains were going to explode.  Hmm… actually, it’s a bit of a toss-up.

The less said about that trip, the better.  I guess to really appreciate the good, you need to have a little of the crappy as well.

I moved into my new place in mid-December and though I changed my address with work, I figured that my W-2 for my taxes would go to my old address.    To my surprise, it got to my new address  – but my former room-mate called and said that someone else’s from the university had ended up with my old address and went to my former apartment.  He dropped it off to me with some other stuff the next day and I decided to hand deliver this to save this fellow employee some time.

I looked up her campus address and couldn’t figure out how my update of my address online could have triggered this error – since there didn’t seem to be any connection by name, department, or campus address.   A little bit more digging and I realized that her employee number was one digit off from mine.

This wasn’t my fault, but I still felt a little bit responsible.   So, I wrote up a note in case she wasn’t in her office and headed across campus.  I finally found her department and the admin assistant at the desk.  My one-digit neighbor wasn’t in and it turns out she taught at off campus locations and was almost never in.  The admin assistant said she would call and email her to have her stop by – and then thanked me for making the trip.    I’m glad I went to the extra effort to hand-deliver this  – if it had just gone through campus mail there’s no telling how long it might have sat in an envelope on in her mailbox.

It will be interesting to see if I hear anything back on this one – or if anyone ever figures out what happened.  One digit.  That was all it took to mess things up.

Working on a computer helpdesk was a bit stressful, but there were only a couple of times when it really got to me.  Here’s the second instance.

I was working by myself late one evening and looking forward to going home and relaxing.  With about 20 minutes to go before I put the phones on voice-mail, a call came in from a faculty member looking for help with Windows 98 dial up networking.    That alone will tell you how long ago this was, but it was pretty well burned into my memory.

I had been working at the helpdesk long enough that I could walk someone through this process with my eyes closed and my computer turned off, but I was not prepared for this support call.

He didn’t listen to my instructions, so I had to repeat everything.  He clicked on things randomly and was never in the same place I was. He backtracked for no reason.  I was beginning to think it was some kind of test of my patience, so I grabbed a stress ball and settled in for the long haul  – never letting any of my frustration creep into my voice.

A little while later, still no closer to the end, I added a second stress ball to my clenched fist.

Then, I heard a horrible sound – the trill of a windows computer shutting down.  I asked him what happened and he said, “Oh, I rebooted my computer,”

“Okay,” I replied, struggling not to swear, “Well, we weren’t really ready for that step, so when it comes back up we’ll need to… start again. From the beginning.”

By this point, the stress balls were compressed into diamonds.   I pulled an un-sharpened pencil out of the drawer and snapped it.

The little bit of destruction was enough to get though the reboot and we started again.  I talked a little faster to keep him on track and we finally got to the last OK.  The final step was for us to end the call and have him test this out since he only had one phone line.  I told him that I needed to head out for the evening and if things didn’t work he could call the helpdesk back tomorrow and we could pick it up then.  He agreed and we hung up.

I hit the “send all calls to voicemail” button like it was a button to defuse a bomb – which it was, in a way.  The stress balls returned to normal shape, the broken pencil went in the trash and I logged off and headed for my car.

I got home, tired and hungry, to the sound of a ringing phone.  I picked it up even before I set my stuff down.

“Hi son, it’s your mom,” she said, “I’ve got a problem for my favorite geek – my printer isn’t working,”

I signed to myself and dropped my bag on the floor.

“Okay, is the printer turned on and can you see a green light?”

I’ve had to work with a couple of computer helpdesks recently and though I’m not on the “front-lines” anymore, that was where I got my start.  I’ve got a couple of good stories to share  – and by “good”, I mean “terrible”.

It was getting close to lunchtime and I got a call from a woman who has since retired from the university.  She told me that someone had moved the icons around on her desktop and she wanted a ticket opened so a technician could come out and put them back where they were supposed to be.

I paused for a moment before answering to try and figure out if I’d heard her right and decided that, yes, I had heard her correctly.

“Well,” I told her, “Moving icons around on a screen is very easy to do.  If you’ve got a minute, I could walk you through the process of moving them back,”

“No,” she replied, with impatience in her voice, “I don’t have time for that. I just want these put back to where they were and I want someone to come over here and do that,”

I considered arguing the point that it might be a couple of days for someone to go over and “fix” this compared to the minute it would take to walk her through doing it herself – and the irony that it would actually take longer to create the ticket than for her to move things back.  But I realized that it wasn’t about the icons on the screen.  It was instead a deeply held and fundamental resistance to change.

I know people that don’t like change and I get that computers are “scary” – but to refuse to learn even the small amount that it would take to put things back struck me as tragic – especially for someone that works at a university.

I went ahead and opened the ticket and gave her the confirmation number.  I encountered her again years later when I was in a new role at the university and she was as defiantly resistant to learning something new then too.

I can’t imagine being that fearful of things that change – when Everything is always changing.  Even our own bodies are in a constant state of change from moment to moment, with each breath we take.

Makes me glad I’m a web guy – where change is the only constant.

I was just heading out the door to run some errands on Saturday and nearly ran into a woman coming around the back corner of my house.  I said hello and she asked if I was the new owner.  I said I was and she told me that she was the mother of the previous owner and was wondering if they had left any pots behind.  Since we were outside, I thought she meant flowerpots, then I realized that she was talking about cookware.  I thought for a moment, then confirmed I had seen some in a cabinet.

She told me that they were missing them and since she was in the neighborhood, she thought she’d stop by.  I said I would go look for them and invited her in  – which she quickly and uncomfortably declined.  I guess it follows that she wouldn’t want to go into a strangers house, but… whatever.   [Technically speaking, this would have actually been her former house, since the guy that owned the place before grew up there]

I went back inside, found 3 pots and a colander, and brought them back out.  She looked at the stack and asked if I had a bag that she could carry these in since she would look pretty silly carrying a stack of pots.  I went back in yet again and found a bag, then loaded them up for her.  She thanked me and went on her way quickly.  And by quickly, I mean that she was four blocks away by the time I locked up the house and got in my car.

I guess I weirded her out a bit with the invite inside, but she weirded me out a little too.

It’s also weird that the prior family didn’t contact me – they have my email and phone number – if it was really a big deal.   I don’t doubt that she was who she claimed to be, but it was odd.   I would have liked to talk to her about the house, but she was gone very quickly.

I guess it’s just as well that I had already tossed the fuzzy bunny slippers that I found in the dining room cabinet.