Not The Actual Vespa Picture* The black Vespa scooter not actually shown above carried Chris across the Ambassador bridge every morning. A Canadian fellow, he joined our Detroit workforce every day to run the HR department at a local land survey company which was, coincidentally, one of my long-term clients. His death, not so recent as my knowledge of it is, makes for conflicted late night thinking.
I’m 34 and have had the same job since I was two months shy of my 21st birthday. I say this not to rub your noses in my old-school job stability, nor to lament the lack of change in my life
** during that span of time. I mention this to help you understand that over the years I’ve gotten pretty close to many of my clients, who have come to exist somewhere in the nowhere land between acquaintancehood and friendship. Two of these relationships have ended in death.
Not at my hands, no, I’ve yet to verifiably kill anyone. The first was Jeff, who worked as head factory foreman for a local automotive paint manufacturer. He’d already been off work for awhile due to a DUI conviction (complete with short-term incarceration) when he crashed his car head-on into a freeway overpass during what turned out to be his last drunk driving offense. Jeff was a tall, jovial fellow who always had an easy smile and a quick, sarcastic wit. He enjoyed technology, and was excited when I gave him a copy of “Asteroids” for his company-issued Palm V. In life, he did much of the scripting for their process control programs. In death, the scripting lived on.
Why is it that I wonder so often about what happened to that Palm V, does it still have his copy of Asteroids, are his high scores still there? Sometimes, when I work on the computers at that paint company and run across some documentation he left behind, often with some smart-ass side notes, I feel as if somehow he’s still there. Like he’ll walk through the door and ask me if I’ve got any new games for his Palm. I kinda miss Jeff.
Chris, on the other hand… A bit of a prick, he was a clever fellow about my age who seemed too hip for his own good. One of those guys who think they know how everything works, how everything is full of shit, he went one further and felt that he was probably the only one in the room who knew exactly how much shit that actually was. I very rarely saw him smile, though he often displayed dry humor and a mocking tone which dripped with a cultural reference level comparable to Dennis Miller or, perhaps, Ira Flato.
As I mentioned before, he rode a Vespa through rush-hour traffic, crossing the Ambassador bridge from Windsor every day. I often joked that he’d die on that Vespa, victim of some drunk/high/enraged Detroiter wielding a deadly Furd Expulsion or Weepsler Dingo on a Monday morning. Ironic that he dropped dead of an aneurysm on a Saturday. That this death was completely unexpected, and that it occurred on
his wedding day made it particularly tragic. To raise the pathos of his passing to the most ridiculous level possible without introducing a drifter named Hank who “likes his knives real hard” into the nursery, Chris’ death actually happened hours
before the wedding ceremony, leaving his fiance with no legal rights to the Vespa.
Like Jeff before him, Chris talks to me through his digital remains. Spreadsheets, macros, work process documents, all remain to help track and direct his HR department from beyond the grave. Recently I was told to help the company open an encrypted file which Chris had created.
There is no mortal man or woman on this Earth who knows the password necessary to open that file. I tried “CanadianPrick,” but I’m glad to say that this didn’t work at all. I find I miss Chris, that damn Canuk.
* Due to today’s hard drive crash in my laptop, I’m having difficulty accessing my photographs. If you are Davecat, and still have the picture of this Vespa I sent you last year, could you forward it to me please?
** See post before last post as to how I feel this has affected my sense of time
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