#scintilla13: (I'm Looking for) Cracks in the Pavement

What talent do you have that your usual blog readers don't know about? Talk about a time when you showed it to its best advantage.

I don't often do this in real life, but at work I'm often known for seeing issues where others may not notice them. I'm hesitant to call it the overused "thinking outside of the box" (my jobs have put me off a lot of buzzwords and phrases, sadly), it's more that I'm really picky about procedures, especially if it's something that will adversely affect something. I think what happens more often than not is that I'll see my team or my managers get excited about a procedure and want to have it implemented as quickly as possible, and I'm always a bit iffy when so many people get excited about a new toy. I like to see how it works and what could go wrong, because, well...let's just say that my favorite phrase there is "the system is only as good as the person who programmed it." It's less about thinking outside the box as it is keeping the issue at hand tethered in reality. That way when it does fall apart, I know or at least can figure out why.

#scintilla13: give us a beat then?

Write about a chance meeting that has stayed with you ever since.

I have to admit I don't speak with him nearly as often as I should, but this question reminded me of my friend Bruce, who I met at Yankee Candle in early 2001. This was just before the then-new YC warehouse opened up the road, and I'd just switched over to first shift a month or so previous. He'd been working over at one of YC's satellite buildings and was visiting my building for a few weeks for a special project. We were both in the shipping department (then called "trafficking", much to everyone's amusement) and were of similar mind--we paid attention to our work, we both realized pallet building is like a giant game of Jenga, and most importantly, we found out we were both musically inclined. He'd been a drummer/percussionist for a local bar band and I've been playing guitar for years; we both listened to a hell of a lot of music (we have wildly diverging tastes, but there's a lot of bleedover too). After a few months on the job, it felt weird to suddenly have another person who got what I was talking about half the time. By the time we moved to the new building in April of 2001, he and I were pretty much best buds and partners in crime. By the end of the year we found a third guy who was into music, and started a band called jeb! (Jon, Eric, Bruce) and jammed off and on for a good couple of years [the subject line is something I ad-libbed to him on one of our songs]. He was also a good soundboard for my writing, as I was working on my trilogy at that point.

I left YC in early 2005 when I moved down to New Jersey (and later to San Francisco), and I know my leaving hit him pretty hard, but we did our best to get together and talk now and again. I try to meet up with him when I'm in Massachusetts and if he's around. Just recently I tranferred all of jeb!'s stuff to mp3 and emailed him one of the tracks. I've been thinking I should reach out to him again (I've been pretty bad at connecting with others who aren't online as much as I am). He's got his own family now (two kids!) and he's no longer at YC either, and we've gone our separate ways, but I have to say it was great hanging with him during those days.