and Words
There’s a feeling deep inside me
Can’t describe it, but it made me see
That life is stronger than both you and me
Once a fire burned so brightly
But your heat turned our love into sand
Don’t ask me, baby
Why it has to end
I’m alive
Without you
And I’m better off alone
Like a queen on her throne
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
Shortly after I arrive at Breakfast Club one morning, my friend Kelly turns to me and asks, “Are you okay?” These days, we meet over Skype, and it’s currently just the two of us in the room. He wasn’t asking in an ironic or sarcastic way; he asked genuinely. While I’m touched by the gesture, I’m honestly a little perplexed. I don’t post about every minutia of my life on social media, and we meet pretty regularly. I mentally reflected on recent events and came up blank.
As it happens, it was a response to a recent post in this blog, where I wrote a personal experience towards the end of that post. Those words genuinely expressed how we felt. That night and that particular moment shattered us. It remains to this day, one of the most devastating days in memory. However, scribing these words have a magical healing, much like draining the poison off a snake bite.
That said, this is not a post about that snapshot in time decades ago. Instead, I’ll reflect on many moments, snippets of conversations, and cups of coffee.
On a weekday morning, I settle into my office at Microsoft and start my morning routine. I look out the window and observe the neatly landscaped grass. The traffic flowed on 148th Ave NE just beyond the sidewalk. Occasionally, I watch the people as they shuffle off the bus and walk in different directions. On this particular morning, I follow my routine. First, I raise my desk just above standing position. Next, I slide my Rebel Desk 1000 treadmill under the desk into its familiar position. Finally, I start the treadmill at a slow walking pace and log in to my computer.
On many such mornings, I play music to get my mind flowing. Subsequently, music streams from a play list named “Morning Kick Start”. As “I’m Alive” by Issa, a Norwegian female vocalist plays at a modest volume over my speakers. One by one, I accumulate steps as I inch my way towards my 10,000 steps. Around 8am, I see movement in the hallway as a figure approaches. Kelly, a peer from my sister team, walks around inquisitively. He looks into my office and asks a simple question, “Coffee?”
This simple question is a ritual that repeats most mornings. While I’m mostly a social coffee drinker, Kelly is a regular coffee drinker. By the time he makes his coffee rounds, it’s time for his second cup. I pocket my phone, and we gather more people. Then we collectively walk to the cafeteria in the next building, the closest espresso stand, where we’d take turns buying coffee.
Subtly, one cup of coffee at a time, we exchange stories; we have a combined tenure over forty years at the company. Astonishingly, we had not worked together before; our respective journeys seemed to almost deliberately avoid the other. As we conversed more, we found that both shared an amusement for demotivational posters from Despair.com; I proudly displayed this one in my office. I even framed it. Since Microsoft allowed us to dress casually, we wore Hawaiian shirts regularly.
Along with our similarities, we also had differences. I grew up in a modest household and spent time in the service industry, through college, leading up to my start at Microsoft professionally. He, on the other hand, came up through the GI Bill and the military and told fascinating tales of his time in the service. We both spoke three languages, though only shared English in common; between us we could converse in five languages.
During one such conversation, he tells the tale of a conversation years ago with his manager. While he accomplished all of his tasks, there was some concern about how he and his peer fed off each other’s disposition. The precise words were synergistic negativity. He wore those words like a badge of honor; I concur.
Since we both founded our careers in the test discipline, it’s natural that our inclinations leaned towards the negative and destructive. In a recent conversation where they asked me to explain my job, I simply responded with, “I write software to break software.” If there was ever a professional embodiment of schadenfreude, it’d be a test engineer. It’s only second nature to have a negative disposition; those who are good at our craft will amplify each other.
During one of these coffee chats, Kelly tells me that he’s retiring. While I’m delighted that he’s moving to the next phase of his life, I can selfishly curse the moments which we’ll miss. We continue our conversations, regularly, dutifully, until his end date. I not only understand, but also celebrate the circumstances for his move, but if there’s anything I’ve learned in this world is not to apologize for how I feel. Feelings don’t need to be rational; his moving away saddens me.
For a while, this is precisely how life continued. Those who remained still met for coffee regularly. At times it seemed like a figurative extension of muscle memory; sometimes it felt like a tribute to our missing friend. We’d share the occasional picture one of us in an ugly sweater or in costume in Halloween, when I dressed like a hot dog. Maybe it was a selfie where a collection of us sat at the same familiar table, almost like a coffee version of the missing man formation.
Then the world shut down in March 2020; once the pandemic struck, they asked us to work remotely. Our leadership initially speculated that we’d be sent home for “about three weeks.” They were easily off by at least an order of magnitude. However, I valued these conversations with my peeps, so I morphed them to conducting them online. Initially, we all found meeting online this way awkward and unfamiliar, but eventually we got used to it. For a few months still, we continued to meet this way.
A few modest months later in July 2020, I received yet more unimaginable news. Just short of my 29-year anniversary, Microsoft lays me off. I could fill a post on the aftermath of this alone. Suffice it to say, our coffee conversations persisted in the form of the aforementioned Breakfast Club, though now that moved from a Microsoft internal meeting to one hosted in Skype. If there’s a silver lining to the pandemic and Microsoft terminating my employment, it was the eventual moving to meeting online consistently. A number of us former Microsoft employees continue to meet online, some sporadically and some consistently.
Describing concepts like friendship and trust have a curious quality in that they’re almost awkward to mention. I implicitly know where I stand with Kelly without the need to utter that f-word. Instead, friendship is more effectively expressed with simple questions like, “Are you okay?” Or even “Coffee?”