I mentioned our development team from Orlando yesterday… There were four of us. Linda, of course, was our fearless leader. She taught me a lot about managing projects, managing customers, and managing people. She also didn’t take crap from anybody. I liked working for her.
I lived in Orlando for a little over four years, and Linda was the only person I met who’d actually been born in Florida. Weird.
Tom was a transplant from Minnesota. He had an odd sense of humor, and I don’t think he ever really acclimated to Orlando. He was a hard worker though, and I enjoyed working with him.
Then, of course, there was me.
And finally, there was Keith.
Hoo boy… where to start…
Have you ever read the Dilbert cartoon? Well, Keith was Wally. Wally with some additional talents.
Keith had a knack for telling stories. He was good at it, and he had a lot of things happen to him. Many of them were his fault. See, he had another talent… He was an expert at digging himself deeper.
Example: He make a smartass comment to somebody. (Usually Linda.) She’d give him the evil eye, and he’d start “explaining” what he really meant. Which usually just made things worse. You really couldn’t get mad at him, because he was such a comical guy. (And I would usually be standing next to him while he explained, miming him shoveling his whole deeper and deeper.)
He was als0 adept at The Prank. When the Macarena was (inexplicably) a big thing, he loaded a music file onto my computer and made it my startup AND shutdown sound. Another time, Linda was on vacation for a week and he wanted to do something to her office. I only said two words and he ran with it.
Cat. Outline.
He got white tape and fashioned a cat outline on her floor, like there was a dead body in there, and somehow talked the guard into giving him some “Police Line” tape to string across her doorway. She ended up leaving everything in place for a long while.
Linda ended up taking a job at Disney, around the same time I left for Fort Worth. Tom later moved back to Minnesota. I’m not sure where Keith ended up.
But wherever he is, I’m sure he’s still digging.