So incredible. It still feels like it happened to somebody else. While writing that, yesterday, I realized that I was a participant in the whole situation most of the time. Not the first CIO meeting; George was downright crazy for doing that, but he disagrees with me on that. In that second CIO meeting, I contributed a few points of my own; but really, Greg had the stones to speak up -- I wouldn't have had he not gotten the ball rolling, so my contribution isn't something I really remember much of.

I'm pretty sure I got the quote from the new director perfectly, though -- it was a moment in my life where I felt like I had witnessed "the right decision being made, even though it was tough to make" along with a whole mess of vindication for the tens of times I had butted heads with Bob. Someone looking skeptically might attribute some form of good will toward Bob. That's cool and I hope he's all right. He had family and friends; I'm sure someone found him to delightful. We never met the great Dad that he might be. We got stuck with laser-focused pure-rage.

My favorite Greg, not Bob, story, though is the reason he's among my best friends years after that job. I had started in Desktop Support at a company that was 80% VT-something-or-other terminals in 1997[0]. Greg started a month after me, and shared my work-aholic tendencies[1]. The new VP of our new IT department, who's name is not Wesley, but who was one you could count on to correct you if you didn't use his full, given name, came to our office. We were HQ#2 back then.

To set the stage, he picked a 25-person conference room for all ... 70-or-so? of us, for an hour-long mandatory meeting[2]. He's sitting with his butt leaning against the edge of a whiteboard, standing in the corner, wearing Birkenstock sandals and socks (nothing against Birks; owned 6 pairs in my life), addressing the tightly packed, mostly standing group. Greg is sitting at the oval table in the center. Before Wesley starts talking, it's obvious, he's going for a certain look. It wasn't hipster (AFAIK, too early). Then he started, trying to communicate ... something ... what ... the fsck ... are these words ...? Everyone in the room has a look on their face that resembles some form of straining. He mis-used words, he made new words made out of combinations of obscure words. Poly-isomorphic was used twice among several words that "I don't think it means what you think it means".

Greg told me about a habit he had when people drone on and on. He starts counting those "annoying words", "uh's" and "um's", "you know's" and such and keeps score. It's a curse. I can't help but do the exact same thing[3]. I had to stop when the Migraine hit. Greg was in rapt attention, awkwardly, the only one in the room feigning interest.

Q&A comes up and I ask about our mess-of-an-e-mail[4] platform, and he responds "Netscape"-something-or-other. Greg speaks up and asks if we had evaluated GroupWise, Exchange or another option[5], carefully elevating his vocabulary to sound "intelligent, but not douche-y" and mid-sentence he pauses, blinks, and says "...I'm sorry, ... did you want me to fluff you?"

Now, it's hard to convey how that was delivered without the accompanying voice. Greg's voice is right in the middle; neither booming nor weak. I'd guess he sings around a Tenor range. He delivered this in with the same tone a server at a restaurant, might. There a desire to help in his tone, along with a tinge of innocence, and empathy: "Oh, that's my fault, I forgot to hold the mushrooms for you. Let me just run back and fix that." The words were at a total disconnect with the delivery. He delivered a slap in the face that you feel obligated to tip him for.

It sucked the air out of the room. Wesley lets out an uncomfortable laugh and says, and in his first display of humanity, says "No, no, ..." and the room erupts in laughter. It's 55-minutes into this meeting. Many of the participants in the room are middle-aged very-overweight men who are visibly wet with sweat because it's mid-summer and you don't jam that many people into a conference room for an hour. The collective laughter was like a bomb going off; people left cubicles out of concern to see what the noise was.

Greg was early 20s, I was 19, we were the youngest in the department by at least 5 years, and younger than most by 15. Here's this "equivalent to the cashier" spanking the district manager in front of his entire team on his day of introduction. And he was saying exactly what everyone in that room was thinking. Stones on this guy[6].

Funny thing is, for the most part, it became a story and that's it. Our, collective, manager told him "That was awesome" and he never took any heat for it. I'm guessing Wesley was a little embarrassed and just let it go. He stuck around for another year-and-a-half until the first acquisition or-so, and occasionally worked on things with Greg, but it was never brought up between them. Though it wasn't a Hollywood-style "and Wesley had a new found respect for Greg" ... I think Wesley realized, rightly, that Greg was an "equivalent to a cashier" at the time and wouldn't be competing for his job before he was long gone.

[0] That was flipped in 6 months, but the most used app was a $100 product we had to install to handle whatever VT-weird escape sequences this thing used to display colors and accept input.

[1] My dad is a happily retired small business owner with a fierce work-ethic. Some would say workaholic. I was his son. He was an awesome Dad growing up, and is an awesome Dad, now (he doesn't read HN).

[2] I'm bitching, but he brought a fountain coke machine with him for permanent installation on the IT floor only, so we weren't unhappy. Suck it, Google! :)

[3] My apologies if the curse strikes you, now. :(

[4] Lotus CC:Mail - I became an expert in recovering people's inboxes. It was a fantastic piece of software. You could read mountains of e-mail provided you had an IT guy near by who could kill a day helping you de-corrupt your inbox file. It's like your whole inbox was just that .pst file. Still gives me nightmares

[5] I want to say Greg was leaning the lines of postfix/a unix/open-source option, or a straight up Microsoft Exchange buy into the Borg scenario (he was an admirer of Bill Gates back when that was frowned upon /s).

[6] Apologies for the graphic reference ... no better way to describe. It's part bravery. And were it anyone else I'd say "It's a little bit of stupid mixed in" but no, with rare exception this guy knew those were the right words at that time and knew full well he might be forced to walk out of the building (at least, in the early days). I think I've heard him speak a profanity twice, all placed very intentionally to make a point, and used as though they were high explosives to be used in the most dire of situations.