Good friends and egg-salad sandwiches

My good friend Daredevil looked me up recently. He's still in the tech industry, living in the Bay Area, and business brought him to Westminster. He called me up to take dinner.

Daredevil and I used to teach seminars together. I was Lewis to his Martin, Martin to his Rowan, Madden to his Gifford, Satchel to his Paige, you get the picture. A room of twenty or so people would sit in a meeting room at a Courtyard by Marriott, or a Doubletree, or whatnot, for three solid days listening to us describe how IEEE 802.7 broadband local area networks operated, or how to shove an entire band of cable TV signals down a wavelength of a singlemode fiber. And they paid for the opportunity.

His girlfriend at the time was becoming jealous of me, we spent so much time together. But hey, no wiry blonde in dire need of having her meds adjusted can compete with golf in Palm Springs on Super Bowl Sunday (it was a ghost town), for example, or golf in Orange, Connecticut on an autumn evening, or freezing our asses off in Hartford, or blackpowder hunting for deer, or a tour of Johnson Space Center, or dropping dollars in the gentlemen's clubs of Houston, Baltimore, Denver, the LAX vicinity, Hartford, et cetera.

We eventually were bitten by the sales engineering bug, and sought positions over there, in the early Nineties. He relocated to take a position with a business unit in Fremont, I stayed in Pennsylvania, and we hardly saw each other. As business those days took off, he followed his career to other companies in the area, and I eventually did too. But we stayed in touch, some times better than at others.

Since telecom started sucking, we've both been battered around, but he's sticking it out in the industry while I've practically forsaken it for Guard-bumming.

Thanks for dinner, Daredevil, and may business bring you to the Front Range again soon.