In 1996, after emigrating to the US and dealing with the leviathan that was then the Immigration and Naturalization Services, I pretty much underwent a "career reboot". I'd done well for myself in the UK - impeccable qualifications, great experience, moving up through the company, maybe not fame and fortune but I was out there nonetheless - and here I was, ignoring the voices calling me a "lovestruck fool", in another country. Restarting. From square one. Nothing that had gone before counted. I took my work permit and my new Social Security card and the lady behind the counter said, "Off you go. Get a job. Today. Bagging groceries if you like. We don't care; welfare isn't an option for you. Don't wait." I was ready to head into Kroger's and do just that, but my new wife refused. "I'm not having you do that. You're much more than that." Interminable months dragged on; Kraft macaroni and cheese gets old after a while. I fiddled around with an old dot-matrix printer, a typewriter ribbon, a Commodore 64 and some ingenuity at Kinko's and somehow threw together a decent-looking resume. I sent them out. I hand-delivered them. I walked my soles off. I was told I may as well forget it; I didn't have a Computer Science degree. (The degree I have, or the experience, apparently doesn't impress anybody. Ironic). Finally, one afternoon, I stumbled into a company specializing in kitchen and bathroom design software.
I was uncomfortable in that suit. The three jeans and t-shirted gentlemen in front of me were even more uncomfortable that I'd walked into the building wearing a suit, too. They asked a handful of questions, the slightly older of the three picked my brains with a horrendous piece of obfuscated C. The boyish-looking one asked me about my 3D experience, which basically consisted of saying the words "rotation matrix" and seeing if my eyes clouded over. But this blog is about the third person in the room. He looked young, very young. Younger than me. Mischievous. I don't think he said much through most of the interview, although he beamed and grinned a lot, larger than life. Something was definitely amusing him. "Let's send him home with a Windows book" was about all I remember him saying. "See you next week". I crashed through the book that week, with no computer to try any of this on, nothing. I can blag this stuff as good as anybody. The week passed. I dressed down a little, but not too much, and turned up the following Monday. The long-haired older man met me at the door. "Let me show you to your cube," he said, then quickly added, "I apologize in advance". Nobody else had arrived yet. About an hour later, everyone else started straggling in, introducing themselves, pointing out that, no, this wasn't a dress pants place. This was, in all truth, a zoo. "Things have improved though since they made us leave our cubes to go to the toilet," the larger-than-life guy from the interview quipped as he sat in the cube next to me. "Oh, ignore the guy behind you. He's an asshole." Great. This was it. And, it turns out, it didn't pay a whole lot more than bagging groceries, either.
The first day was spent meeting people; a peculiarly small company. Sales ladies in the front room, programmers in the back. I set up my corporate e-mail for the rest of the afternoon, constantly aware of a strange 'ping' sound from the ceiling above me. I'd look up, and it would stop. Look back at the screen, and it was incessant. I stood up and peered at Mark in the cube next to me, as he lined up one rubber-band gun after another; bouncing them off my ceiling into the cube behind. The neighbor in the cube in front was doing the same. Five o'clock came around and Mark walked around to my cube. "Let's show you. This guy behind you, right, he's a sociopath. He expects this all day. This is what we do to him all the time." They went round to his vacant cube, fiddled with a few registry keys on his machine, attached a thin speaker cable to the sprinkler above his chair, and Mark said - "There. We're set for tomorrow. What the hell did you want to come work here for, anyway?". I began to wonder, but we sat down and chatted. Mark pointed out that the reason I was here was all three of them were convinced I had somehow managed to BS on my resume; anyone who could BS that well, deserved a job here.
For precisely the next 364 days, Mark was my nearest neighbor in the corporate world. The rubber bands and pellets continued to bounce off the ceiling - sometimes it became coins. Mark was a prankster of the highest order; while I'm always in for mischief, Mark had elevated it to an art form. The 'sociopath' behind me was the butt of most of the pranks; to be honest, I believed he enjoyed them as much as anyone else, because he certainly didn't try to stop them. Inverted ketchup bottles were taped to the ceiling above him, waiting for the drip to drip, just like in the TV commercials. His machine had been compromised to the point where, at the touch of a button, the instigators could send out e-mail to the entire company advertising that "he was playing Quake and would anyone to join the deathmatch". Screen-savers suddenly, inexplicably, kicked in with anything considered NSFW. To top it all, Mark had managed to turn flatulence into an absolute art form, almost an extension of the English language, a new way to effectively punctuate. "You're an idiot" was followed by a perfectly-timed pause and an appropriate, ripping piece of gas. Pure little boy humor, yes. The only way to keep any sanity in this madhouse, perhaps. It might sound crazy, but this place turned out to be one of the most pleasurable places I'd ever worked. The hijinks didn't fool me for a minute. These guys were smart. Smart enough to do their jobs, smart enough to realize that, yes, life's all too short, and there's little point in taking it too seriously. Nobody gets out of it alive. We were all horrendously underpaid, undervalued, and so took compensation elsewhere. It was, above all, an incredible place to learn. Mark in particular was one of the sharpest guys I knew; and was thoroughly selfless with it. Back in those days, runtime errors always came up in a horrendous DOS debugger, all yellow text on a blue screen, assembler everywhere, what I'd cut my teeth on, what seemed another life away. Mark knew exactly who to call for. "Brit Boy, come and read this shit for me." Ahhh, yes. Brit Boy. The reputation as a pedal-to-the-metal guy stuck, as did the nickname. Later, after the birth of my son, Mark nicknamed him too; "Bubba Chubs". He's 11 now, and, yes, his nickname is still the same. Mark despaired of me, married with children. He'd never be caught like that. He was having far too much fun. Nevertheless, he had an inerrant understanding of human nature. He knew, without a doubt, precisely which mornings I'd been the one feeding the baby. Only later did I discover it was because Bubba Chubs had belched a string-cheese line of sick down the back of my shoulder.
Rumors spread in 1998 that a UK company intended to buy us out; a company that had its own software, a company that just wanted our customers, and didn't need us. "The British are coming" quips began around the office, but it was somewhat muted. We were the national #1 in what we did; we were everywhere except Home Depot (Agent Orange, as we called them). We got standing ovations at trade shows for including calculators that worked in feet and inches. But we knew what was coming. In public, Mark quipped that "Brit Boy will be all right, they'll have him back in a redcoat". In private, he pulled me to one side and sagely said, "Whatever you do, do not finish that project. Once it's done, so are you. Then the rest of us." I stalled and stalled; not a difficult proposition, it was an insanely difficult product. Photo-quality rendering of new kitchen and bathroom plans; trivial now, for sure, but this was 1998. The printed versions were still slow; it would still take an hour to produce that photo quality. Nevertheless, one day shy of my one year of service, they said enough was enough, and asked me to burn an installation CD. That afternoon, I was called into the manager's office. "Make sure you come back in this room, afterwards," Mark hollered after me. Maybe with a little tear in his eye. The beginning of the end. The manager refused to look me in the eye and said the words we all knew were coming. "It hurts me to say this...", "I wish it didn't have to be this way...", "We've given you glowing references...". He never once looked up. And, while I was upset, I didn't say a word. I went back to the workroom. We all hugged. Everyone wished me well, said they knew full well they wouldn't be far behind. Mark told me to keep in touch and said perhaps I might as well just keep coming into work anyway. Nobody would notice. Or mind. And off I went, back into the career wilderness.
The story doesn't end there. Far from it. About a year later, we were on hard times again. I was working from home, or at least trying to. Bubba Chubs was pulling himself up on every piece of furniture, gained an exceptional talent for finding Ctrl-Alt-Del, and probably thought the correct order of the alphabet was QWERTYUIOP. I loved being home with the kids; certainly more than desperately playing 'phone tag to try to get work. Fortunately I'd picked up a good contract, I was busy enough. One afternoon I lazily gazed out of the window as a bolt of lightning hit the ground in the yard. Everything powered off; the breakers kicked back on, almost everything came back on. Except the computer. I hastily disassembled it, picked the drive up, tried it in another machine. It wouldn't read it. Went to see my employer, tried it on his machines, they wouldn't read it either. The only person I could think who would know how to solve this problem was Mark, so I gave him a call, on the off-chance he was still there. He was; just him and one other. The rest of the programmers had followed me. He suggested, by all means, come on in, why not use my old computer, it was still there, in my old cube. And, while I was at it, why not get the paperwork to cash out my 401(k). Things were surely tough. I went in that afternoon, everything was dismantled and ready for me to try the drive. It worked; I got my code off, I was back in business. We sat around and shot the breeze for a while; caught up on everyone, where they'd all gone. Mark was surely next, but there he was, jolly as ever. I left the office and said, yet again, that we'd stay in touch. Of course, it never happens, and, just a few brief months later, things were getting frantic again. That job bagging groceries didn't seem like such a ridiculous proposition at all. We were piling the bills on the table one evening, and gathering piles of change to take to the Coinstar machine. Out of the blue, the 'phone rang. The lady on the other end introduced herself as an account manager for a contract/temp firm and said "my friend Mark had recommended me, but didn't know if I'd be interested since I was probably working for NASA or something." That, in itself, was surely Mark's dry wit. There was no time to waste, could I meet her for breakfast at the Marriott the next morning and she'd see what she could do. I interviewed with her, was whisked straight to the client company and interviewed there. The big one. The one every software engineer in this town wants to work for. The one that had declined me umpteen times for no Computer Science degree. I was taken on as a contractor on the spot. A couple of short years later, I became full-time, and now, here I am. Back to the career point I was when I left the UK.
It's one of those glib things people say, of course it's never always the complete truth. Human interactions can be so dazzlingly random, so chaotic; it's hard to just single out just one person and say, yes, Mark, I owe it all to you - and he wouldn't want me to do that either. He'd just look at me, smirk and say, "You know Brit Boy, you're full of it. Shee-yit." (No doubt with appropriate punctuation). Slowly, one at a time, almost everyone else who worked at the zoo found their way to this place; we were scattered, but in a sense, the gang was all here. We had annual reunion lunches at the Happy Dragon, a firm favorite from our original time. Every year, one or two of the zoo inmates reappeared. By 2009, everyone was accounted for. Mark had changed a little. A little slimmer, hiding behind a beard; apparently married with children suited him after all. Underneath it all, he was still the same, still jolly, reminiscing over those insane practical jokes we'd played, about a dozen years before. We all looked forward to our annual reunions, we all claimed we'd stay in touch much closer. There was no excuse, we were in neighboring buildings, after all. Of course, we never did.
Mark Lafferty (1972 - 2009) is survived by his wife and three young children. My best wishes go to them all at this difficult time, and my thanks go to Mark for the difference he's made to so many of us. We'll miss him.
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