I met Dave at my first job at a company called Dataline in 1979, a company I talk about in detail in my second book, How I Invented the Internet. I was in possession of a master’s degree in library science (ink barely dry), hired to be the systems librarian at the computer timesharing company that was at the forefront of an industry that would eventually morph into application service providers and most recently “the cloud.” I had no idea what I was doing.
Dave was a computer operations supervisor, overseeing the operators who mounted and dismounted the tapes that fed the rows of six DEC 10 midframes that lived on the third floor of our building and tended the output from the wide-format printers and tamed the beasts when they misbehaved. Which was often. But if all was well in the kingdom of bits and bytes, Dave would be in his cubicle, trying to prevent me from concentrating on my important work. I only wish I had known what that was.
Dave was a short, wiry guy with wiry hair to match and a dimple in his chin that could hold a hot tub. And always a smile that made it look like he was up to something that might not be entirely legal. He did everything to the max. When he smoked, he smoked many packs a day. He told me that when he was a drinker (before I knew him), he did that to the max as well. And when he took up running, he would do two segments of ten kilometers, morning and night.
He must have seen me flailing about, so he took me under his wing and explained the lay of the land. The land of technology companies and computer programmers and possibly less than friendly environments for clueless fresh (female) meat.
When I quit the job and moved to Saskatoon he kept in touch, sending me hilarious letters festooned with his talented drawings, mostly caricatures of himself and my former coworkers. There was nothing better to receive in the nadir of bleak Saskatchewan winters, as I stumbled through yet another hapless job and a dismal social life.
When I moved back to Toronto to go to business school two years later, we had lost touch. It wasn’t until I attended a Dataline reunion a couple of years ago that I connected with someone who knew where he was and finally got an email address and eventually a phone number. At that point, his health was not good and he was in a long-term care home, despite being barely 70.
You know what they say: life is what happens when you’re making other plans. I can say this from experience: minutia and daily crises often consume our time and energy to the extent that we don’t see the bigger picture. The picture of the people we’ve met who’ve made a difference in our lives who we’ve left by the wayside. I left Dave a voicemail on April 15. He died April 30. Godspeed Dave.
Thanks for this fitting tribute and memory of Dave, who as you know was also my friend at Dataline on my first information technology job. Over the years my memory of him has blurred so thanks also for bringing him into clearer focus. I’d forgotten about the big chin dimple but I do remember his sense of humour, frenetic energy, shared lunches and his artistic gift.