Have I told you enough about Dell that you know what it was like, sort of, to work there?  The way it was for us, it was different maybe for other groups, but what they did was this: they took their best and most creative technicians, they mixed us with their best and most creative analysts and engineers and mid-level managers, and they locked us in a universe all out own for a few years. And in that time they threatened, cajoled, beat, encouraged, rewarded, and punished us with capricious regularity and damning severity and we all gelled into a unit, a team of people so into our universe that anyone else entering would think we'd been family for a hundred years. You press your back to mine, and we'll kill whatever comes at us, and we'll feed each other, and we'll help each other deal with the menacing corporate hellhole that looms our jobs over our heads, our very lives over our heads, hangs them there and says you mean nothing. So to each other, we meant everything.

And I mean everything, and though there were outliers like any social system, we were all for one when needed, which was often. God forbid someone from outside the group say anything bad about someone in the group. People outside of our team (we were Enterprise System Test, or EST) were rightfully intimidated by how tight our team was. Probably sixty people in the whole of it, maybe more, but that seems about right.

The technicians, we were in our own space attached to the lab in little four-cubicle cells. The seating was assigned by our peers and managers, and we were "stuck" in those spots for our time there. I sat with three others, two of whom were rabid lefties and one of whom was a rabid right-wing crazy person from Ghana. I sat next to him in three labs over four years...someone noticed that he and I got along fine, where he and anyone else was a sure fight. There were three such "cells" of four in each row. The next row over housed our grey beards. Older guys, pros who'd been at it for a while at Dell and places like Texas Instruments, AMD, NASA.... One of these guys was a guy called Alan.

I most likely first met Alan while smoking. The few smokers at Round Rock 5 (RR5, our building) knew each other quite well, and I knew Alan at least casually for a good year or so before I started working with him. He was in a different test group than mine (before they'd formed EST), but wasn't an insular fellow...most everyone at RR5 was standoff-ish, wary. You could be replaced or fired or moved or outsourced or laid off any second which tends to make you crazy. So you get wary. Yet, here was this guy with long hair (sometimes back in a ponytail) and sometimes a beard who looked, I swear to god, like someone I'd known my whole life. Instantly friendly and engaging. Every time I'd go out to smoke, if he was there I'd stick around, and we'd talk through three or four cigarettes or a cup of coffee or half of lunch or whatever. He was just this great guy, a musician at heart who had a knack for technical stuff, and he had lived in New Mexico and knew my part of the state and was just...familiar, friendly. Warm.

For the next few years we worked together...though rarely on the same project. Alan had a similar set of skills, albeit his were much deeper, better skills. But we were Linux users, and there tended to be only a few of us proficient enough for test, so they'd put us on separate projects to spread the knowledge out a bit. If the test was Linux based, we'd be on it together. His work ethic was similar to everyone's there: work your ass off but try not to let it own you. He was a great partner to have on a project. But that's so little of what he was, it hardly bears mentioning.

What he was, was a guy who was everyone's friend. He was a steady source of sympathy, empathy, joy, and knowledge. I depended on him in my time there, knowing he knew the deepest most arcane UNIX stuff better than I knew my name.

One Saturday my wife and I got in the car and drove for freaking ever to his house, which is on a small community outside of Austin. The drive was fantastic, though Alan made out like it was too far to go just to see him. I brought two guitars and some beer, and we set up and jammed a bit. Talked a lot, played a little. Alan on guitar...he was a master of the guitar.  And he was a Taylor acoustic player (a master of the 12 string), and a Fender electric player (one of his American strats has a Roland MIDI pickup, which he'd hooked to a Roland effects setup). Me, I'm a Martin and Les Paul guy, so we handed off our guitars and played around, me fumbling and trying hard not to sound completely terrible, him self-depricating but completely at ease with whatever we played.

We talked a bit...he has a huge movie collection, and worried that my wife would get bored, which got us started on a discussion about movies and stories and life and everything else.

He was the sort of person who'd give you everything he had to help you. He was the sort of person who had a quiet ease about his capabilities, who would teach without imposition. The sort of person who makes a perfect friend and teacher.

He was attended to today by a hundred or so friends and family who spoke of him along these same lines, as being a genuinely wonderful human, someone we are all very lucky to have known for whatever brief time we had with him, time made all too brief by his death. He liked fast cars, see. I'd talked to him once about my goofy little hot hatchbacks and we'd gone to look one day at Jaguars. He'd picked one up at some point, and on the way home from a movie just after texting friends about lunch the following day, he was in an accident and died.

Time is short. Do your best. These lessons are never easy.