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Road Warrior

His cubicle was across the aisle from mine, we were rarely in them at the same time. We were “Road Warriors”. We were only in the office on occasion to drop off expense reports, have meetings with company management or attend classes provided by any number of vendors for the products we used. Due to company tradition, everyone had to have a cubicle, even if they were never in it. They thought it to be a perk, we thought it just silly.

He and I had cubicles that shared an aisle at a company’s headquarters. But we never really worked there together.

He lived in upstate New York, I lived out west and the office was in San Francisco. Our families never met and we only knew each other at work. But the work of a 'road warrior' wasn’t like the normal 9 to 5 job. We worked out in the field. We worked until we dropped at client sites and then we flew home, only to turn around the next week and do it all over again. No matter what town we were in we saw the same three things and usually only those three things, The Car Rental Desk, the Hotel Lobby and the client’s windowless raised floor basement. We came in before the sun came up; we went home after it got dark, no matter what time of year it was.

Back then, we all had the “uniform”. White tennis shoes, polo shirts that commemorated some past corporate event in a badge-like emblem, 501 jeans or “dockers” and of course, a leather bomber jacket. We carried laptops and cellphones in our daily service like our fathers and grandfathers carried M1's and hand grenades in theirs. We knew the airline routes the way cab drivers (for the right price…) in Manhattan know how to get to LaGuardia in 15 minutes at rush hour.

We worked like fiends while we were in the field. He was one of my “team” and I was his manager. My crew got all the bad jobs, the most difficult customers, the projects of the greatest risk. I didn’t care, because I had the best team. There were nine of us, men and women all from various backgrounds, abilities and skills and even when we didn’t get along, we wouldn’t trade any of us for anyone else in the world. When you are a manager and you have good people, you have everything you need. Good people, and good people who can work well together are am extremely rare commodity. You treasure a cohesive creative hardworking technical team like oxygen. When you lose one of your team, you grieve over it for years, even if they just take another job.

My weekly ritual was to pack on Sunday, and be ready for the Monday morning flight out. It was a habit I had for years. This time the ritual was interrupted. The call came in the middle of my packing and it came out of nowhere.

“Joe's dead”. Said Jeff, another road warrior who lived near Joe in New York.

Two words. Nothing more. I knew it was real, that he wasn’t kidding. You always know when "the call" really comes. No one calls on Sunday to screw around. I sat slackjawed at the news, and after it was over I instinctively called my manager to inform him and the company CEO, as it was a small company, and we had all known Joe for years. Working in small company is good for your ego, as every individual makes an impact. Joe made a very big impact in our small company, but he would have done the same in the ranks of IBM.

Joe had been complaining of stomach pain before we left the last project together earlier that month. None of us, or Joe himself thought much about it. He just took aspirin and went on about his business with a smile. He never complained, he just went about his job, no matter the circumstances.

He had died of a stomach cancer that had not been diagnosed until just that week. From diagnosis to death, he had 72 hours. He had time to say goodbye to his family, his wife and two girls, put his affairs in order and it was all over. On that Sunday, while packing for a trip that would never happen, I lost a friend and a teammate and my life would never be the same again. On Monday, I would have to be at headquarters to clear out his desk and prepare paperwork for his family, and do what I could to get the word out to the many friends he had made over the years. I made a long list of phone calls to people who were equally shocked and stunned to learn that a man of our age, had died of an old mans disease. All of us sharing the dual paralysis that comes from both the feeling of powerlessness that comes with a death and the recognition that for the grace of god and with enough time, eventually and inevitably there go we all…

Usually, going into headquarters was joyous and fun-filled as it was “slack time”. Time to gab with the cute admins, go shopping and eat and just visit San Francisco. This trip was the opposite of joyous. I drove in early, all the way into the city, despite the expense and difficulty of parking in downtown San Francisco.

I did it for the time alone. I wanted to talk to Joe one more time, and this was my last chance, even if it was just in my head.

The elevator opened to the lobby and I turned down the ornate marbled hall. I thanked God under my breath that the receptionist wasn’t looking up so as to begin having "the dreaded conversation" before I was prepared. I walked down the hall, row after row of empty cubicles, to our aisle. There at the end was my cubicle, and his. A large blowup Godzilla doll, from a release party held years before, marked our row. Godzilla was somewhat less than ominous has he was wearing a bra and a Chevy’s sombrero. For us, this Godzilla was the perfect mascot.

I hung up my jacket, sat my briefcase on the floor and sat down in my cubicle like I had a dozen times and like many times before I looked across the aisle to his cubicle. I just sat there and looked as the Sun began to rise over the Bay.

The pictures on the cube walls, the chair askance. A collection of toys from various trips arrayed behind his monitor, marking his passage to many of the towns we had worked in together. It was as if any minute he would appear around the corner, unaware of all that had occurred in our lives since “the call”. You always think that when someone dies, that its all a big mistake, that like some 60’s sitcom plot “a terrible case of mistaken identity occurred “ and instead of the “great horrible thing” it becomes a joyous case of near death experience and a good laugh is had by all.

But that is never the case. The empty cubicle is still empty and you are still waiting for the man, the friend, who never comes.

I leaned back, put my feet up on my desk and looked across to his cubicle, like I had done on the rare occasions when we were in the office together. I ran over the dozen conversations we had there, but would never have again anywhere.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a light on my desk. It was my phone. Over the holiday, I had not called to get my messages. Normally, I would have done so on Monday morning in preflight mode, but there was to be no flight today.

I clicked the keys and out came the message.

It was from Joe.

“Yo, dude, just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas, I gotta go into the hospital this afternoon but its no big deal so don’t worry. They are just going to take a quick look around, so nothing to get excited about. I should be in and out in no time. I’ll give you call when I get done, I’ll see ya after the first of the year…”.

On my desk, stored in an electronic device, as a series of magnetic blips was the voice of a dead man. The man was dead, but the recording of his voice and a message delivered before his death sentence was given was still there, living on inside my phone. According to the timestamp on the call, from that point till his death, he has 82 hours to live. He didn’t know anything was afoot when he made the message. In his voice was the sound of the Christmas to come and New Years to follow.

The voice echoed over my speakerphone as I played it over and over in the empty office, as if the sound of his voice would cause his spirit to take corporeal form there in front of me. His stuff was there, His voice was there, but he was not and would never be again.

As people began to arrive in the office, I stopped playing the message. And went about my unfortunate managerial duties. I cleared out his desk gingerly, looking for signs of the man I once knew in each knick-knack. I consoled coworkers and tried not to get upset at those who only slightly knew the man caterwauled and carried on like red-hot railroad spikes were being jammed through their feet. I was there, but I was really just going through the motions.

We all were.

After I had finished all the company paperwork, all the boxing of his things, and having made all the obligatory calls to coworkers and clients he had known, I took a walk down to the Embarcadero. I thought about when I had first met him and the things we had done together. I though of the code he had written and the comment blocks of source code running at companies all around the world that had his name in it. Code that was calculating and paying payrolls for hundreds of thousands of people all around the world, created by a man that was now dead and yet only his code block comments were left to show his passing. Thousands of people around the world getting paid accurately every week because of a system he had once had a hand in writing. Now the man was gone, but his code would continue to run, for awhile at least. As the sun went down I realized I had lived in a day that he had never lived to see. The sun had come up and gone down, and he was not there to witness it.

A week later, I was passing through O’Hare. I had arraigned for a long layover to have a little ritual. We used to joke with each other that when we died our souls would spend time changing gates at O’Hare before we passed on to the next world. I sat at the end of the empty area of the B gates and watched people go by, living their lives, unaware that death stalks each of us and can and will reach out to swat us down without warning or concern for our station in life. We are all temporary and nothing and no one lasts forever.

In the distance down the busy gates through the crowds, I caught the sight of a road warrior, and for half a second I thought I saw him. But I knew better. But for that half a second, it felt good to think that I had.

It took 6 months to get around to deleting the message on the phone.

Posted @ January 04, 2005 09:16 PM | Category 2