Earlier today I was thinking about something funny that an old friend and mentor had told me, and it hit me then that I hadn’t heard from him in a while. It wasn’t really out of the ordinary that I hadn’t heard from him, as he often disappeared for a while and then reappeared. I decided to check in on him though, so I went to his profile on Facebook and found a message from his pastor stating that he had suddenly passed away last July. This made me really sad, and my focus for the rest of the day was shot.
My first memory of him was when I was a new hire at my first IT job, and I was listening in on his calls with clients. This is a story I have told countless times to people who I have mentored… There was an issue with the application that we were supporting where having anything other than the default Windows desktop would cause the application to crash. A client called about the issue, and he first had the client do two or three things that were innocuous, but were not going to solve the issue. Eventually, he presented the actual solution as a sort of “Hail Mary” option, and when it worked the client was happy.
He explained to me after that he knew that the client would fight him about removing their kid’s picture from their desktop if he gave them the solution first, but by misdirecting them first and then giving them the solution, the client was just happy to have the problem solved, and didn’t think about how stupid it was that they couldn’t change their desktop wallpaper to whatever they wanted. I probably thought this was a bit cynical in the moment, but eventually as I started to deal with the clients on my own, I realized that it was actually brilliant.
Not everyone got along with him. I recall that he made a few people cry real tears, but it wasn’t intentional. When people would go to him for help, he never just gave them the answer outright. He tried to lead people to finding the answers on their own. Not everyone appreciated this, but I always did, and it has helped me immensely throughout my career.
Thank you, Steve. Godspeed.
I’ll leave you with the funny thing that he said to me that I remembered today for no good reason:
“I’d rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy.”