When I started writing again, I really wanted to mostly talk about code and corporate nonsense. Heaven knows I complain about it all the time. I had debated whether I would discuss things of a personal nature beyond the growing nihilism in my core—which I attribute to our concept of modernity.

A recent event that is both extremely personal and yet very much related to me and code settled that debate, for today at least.

I’m about to tell a story. The memories are hazy. The story is generally true, but as with any story with details from so long ago, I imagine my memory has taken some creative liberties. It doesn’t matter because that’s not really the point.

A dear friend—one who was extraordinarily influential on me in my youth—passed away a couple weeks ago. It’s very important to ensure the memory of his impact on me is both recorded and shared with others. In order to really express the extent of his influence on the person I am today, I have to talk a little bit about the terrified kid who was me almost exactly 31 years ago first.

People who know me now are likely to describe as abrasive. That’s a good word. Brash bordering on arrogant seems accurate. Self-assured to be sure. A friend and co-worker recently told me I had a certain chutzpah. These are not words that would have been used then. The seeds may have been there, but they needed a lot of tending by life.

In the spring of 1994 my family had to move from Reno to Las Vegas. My dad needed to change professions due to an injury and a business opportunity (that would soon go south) uprooted me from the only home I had known to that point. I was going to have to start high school with no friends, no social circle, no support, and no history.

The world had hit the reset button on my life and it was awful.

The two places to meet new people and make new friends were church and high school. Not only was I somewhat resistant to the idea—I wanted my old friends back1—I was also just plain struggling. It’s hard to be a new place, especially at that age.

I had never fit at church, ever. A new ward didn’t change that. As had been the case in Reno, church was a place to go through the motions and be politely forgotten about as soon as I left.

High school was much, much worse. It was a place I went to be picked on, isolated, and bullied by cruel children. It was bad enough that I regularly feigned sickness to avoid going, ditched when I could, often hid away for certain classes, and contemplated suicide on a regular enough basis that it’s note-worthy.

I was an outsider at church because I just wasn’t the right kind of person. I was an outsider in high school because I walked funny and was an easy mark for the predators and vultures. I was an outsider everywhere. The prevailing emotion was shame. I felt ashamed to be me all the time.

I felt like a nerd and I hated it. I hated feeling like me. I hated being a nerd.

This is about the point where I met John. I was fourteen. He was thirty-one.

John was also a nerd. John was such a nerd in fact that his license plate read NERD. John was unabashedly a nerd. John was a nerd every day I knew him.

Less than a year after our move, the business that brought us south had failed and my dad took a new a job as a sales rep for a local tech startup. John was the CTO. John and my father had some things in common: both were world class characters and both were exceptionally gregarious. They got along fine. My dad, as he does, got to talking about his oldest son who was some kind of “computer whiz” who would probably love seeing the office and all the equipment. John told my dad to bring me in and shortly thereafter, he did.

I was nervous about the prospect of meeting a “Chief Technology Officer.” While my dad was happy to tell people about my technological aptitudes, in my head I was just someone who had messed around with BASIC and Logo, knew my way around an Apple IIgs, and played a lot of video games. Maybe that was enough in 1990s to count, but I didn’t feel a whiz.

Regardless, my dad introduced us and John pretty much took over from there. He asked me some questions about how I would solve some random problems with a computer and when I started to stammer through with some spitball ideas—I was definitely not prepared for a quiz—he chuckled and said, “It’s okay. This is just your Kobayashi Maru.”

I knew the reference, as it was from one of my favorite movies. Thank goodness I did because something in me suddenly felt like I belonged.

“Here, put this on.” John was wearing a lab coat because… of course he was wearing a lab coat. He was a huge nerd. Science and technology were going on in the computer lab and if I was going to also do science and technology, I needed wear the proper uniform! I grimaced, then slid into the oversized lab coat. He explained I would have to wear it while I was working in the lab.

“Working?” I asked.

“Yeah. Do you know how to build a PC?” He replied as he headed over to a bench with a PC tower that was partially disassembled.

“No.” I followed.

“Okay, well, you should. Let me show you.” And so he did.

The machine’s case was the gross tan brown color of all the PCs from that era—a color that’s aged as well as those distinct shades of olive and yellow from the 70s. I still remember the look of that tower case very well to this day. The motherboard housed a 486 DX2 66 CPU with 8 MB of RAM composed of a pair 30-pin SIMMs. I know because he was telling me as he went through the hardware.

He was upgrading the machine to run Intel ProShare, the hardware the company was selling. This included ISDN lines which, in 1994, was God Tier bandwidth, clocking in at 128kbps. I had never even been online before and my first experience surfing the web was doing so on the Lamborghini of its day. Needless to day, my later experiences with dial-up would be disappointing.

John’s office would become something of a sanctuary for me. I learned DOS. I learned Windows, including the beta of Windows 95 which felt very cutting edge at the time. I learned to service and upgrade PCs. I learned basic network engineering. I learned about web browsers and the early web. I did all of this after school and I did it all wearing that oversized lab coat.

John, as I said, was a world class character and he was never alone. Over the years that followed, as I worked with him he was more than happy to introduce me to many other such colorful characters. If they were technically inclined he would always get them to teach me something.

I learned how to crimp network cables and set up a T1 from one of his friends. Another gave me my first tour of TCP/IP and Unix on an SGI Indigo. I learned HTML. I learned FTP. I learned HTTP. I even messed with Novell NetWare. The server at the office was aptly named HAL-900 because John was a huge nerd.

I was even able to apply the little bit of programming I knew to all kinds of random things as needed.

“You have the gift,” he would often say to me.

“The gift?” I asked, when he first brought it up after I had coded up some small macro.

“Yeah. Some people just have it for code. You need to keep at it. Don’t waste your time on hardware because the money is way better in software and most people suck at it.” It was funny that he said that because I loved working on hardware, primarily because that’s what we typically worked on together. For software, he farmed me out to his other friends. Programming was never really his thing. Whatever this “gift” was, he didn’t seem to believe he had it.

“And let me tell you something else I want you to remember.” He said very seriously.

“What’s that?” I asked, expecting something sagely in return.

“There is no such thing as enough money! Stick with software.” He laughed and we returned to whatever it was we were working on. Honestly though, that is pretty sagely!

This sort of thing went on for a couple years and a couple different businesses. I tagged along through various businesses as an intern and apprentice. I would find a way over to the offices after school and on some weekends. My other nerd friends came with me from time to time and John was more than happy to give us access to hardware and software. We’d even hook up machines for network gaming and the like well before it was commonplace.

In 1996 I dropped out of high school. It was hell, plain and simple. I hated it. I hated being there. Everything about it made me feel entirely disjointed. How was it I could feel like I belonged with a bunch of grown men who respected what I could do and then go to school to continue to be belittled for anything and everything? How could I feel so stupid? I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but again, in my teenage brain, suicide was still an option.

Thank goodness I had something in my life to actively counterbalance that feeling of shame, even if I could only escape sometimes. I decided I wanted to spend more time there and that my educational needs would be better served learning information technology than hiding in the shadows of high school.

I worked days with my dad and nights and weekends wherever John was. This would later include the world of mid-90s internet pornography because, as John had said, there was no such thing as enough money and this was Vegas baby!

I grew up LDS and was practicing at the time. These worlds were not at all compatible and somehow John made this work. While he never made any bones about the fact that he was something of a devout atheist, he also never gave me any issue for being religious. He didn’t shy away from challenging some of my beliefs, but it was never personal. There was no expectation that I needed to change. Again, John always provided a place where I wasn’t attacked, even where disagreements existed. It was unlike much of the rest of my life.

It was certainly unlike church.

One of the evenings at the office—the porn office—we needed to put together some kind of table. I don’t remember why or for what. I do remember getting some of the parts laid out and then getting started on the assembly. As I was screwing a part together he asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’m screwing the table together. What does it look like I’m doing?” I couldn’t tell if I was annoyed or amused. I was sixteen though, so I was very moody—another thing that did not seem to phase John at all.

“Why are you using that thing?” He pressed.

“The screwdriver? Because I’m dealing with screws.” What was his deal? Seriously.

He walked over with an electric screwdriver and began to screw together one of the other components then looked over at me and said, “Dumb men use muscles. Smart men use electrons!”

Did I happen to mention that John was a huge nerd?

It was such a silly statement really. I laughed when it was spoken and thought very little of it beyond the fact that it was precisely the sort of thing John would say. It wasn’t until I recounted the story to my own father that it really stuck. My dad seemed somewhat put off by the statement and retorted that only a fool wouldn’t know how to use his own muscles.

I think that’s why this ultimately made such an impression on me. I was a boy of two worlds and there they were. I was patching drywall and painting walls by day and learning the secrets of UNIX by night. At the same time, I wasn’t ashamed of either world—maybe for the first time in years. Something about that comment lead to an uncanny amount of clarity about my own life.

There are a lot of stories from that year. The office in downtown Las Vegas would have made for some of the craziest reality TV possible. John’s cast of characters dipped in an out for who knows what all the time along with no shortage strippers and early internet porn entrepreneurs. I continued to learn from the other nerds. It wasn’t just them either. Almost all the adult men who worked or even just hung around there wanted to give me any bit of life advice they could. At sixteen, I probably should not have been there at all! Still, I was “the kid” and many of the guys were going to instruct me on manhood.

One night, as I was out drinking a Mountain Dew, taking a break from messing around with some scripts for a dice bot for online RPGs over IRC. A guy I knew from one of the character squads came out to talk to me. As we chatted, asked me about high school. I explained that I had dropped out and why.

“Look, I don’t really have a lot of skills. You know that. No one would accuse me of being smart. If you do go back to school, and anyone messes with you, you can always let me know and I’ll happily break their legs.” He stated it as a basic matter of fact. I was speechless and yet, I believed him. Despite his self-described lack of skills, he was someone you could believe when he said he could break legs.

This was the world John had brought me into. I say this with nothing but fondness almost three decades later. It was unconventional, but who needs convention[^conventions]?

What I remember the most about that year weren’t the strippers or the antics—and there were plenty of those! I remember the conversations when he’d drive me home, sometimes well past midnight. It was in a 1988 Volvo 240DL wagon—a car that would later be my first car—and I swear he had a tape with exactly one track on it because it’s the only song I ever remember hearing play: Bill Withers’ Just the Two of Us2. (This was before the Jeep Grand Cherokee that seemed to only play smooth jazz.)

The conversations of those drives were very father-son. I was a teenager and the topics were what you would expect. He’d give me career advice. Life advice. Girl advice. (Honestly, a lot of girl advice.) He’d tell me about his own life. He’d also emphasize that life without money sucks and that I should avoid being broke. He’d express no shortage of optimism about science and technology.

No one conversation stands out really, but I always looked forward to those rides home. I was actually disappointed when someone else would take me or I’d get picked up early since my parents typically weren’t driving downtown after midnight.

“May cash be with you, my friend,” he’d say as I got out. This was his customary parting, one he would continue to use the whole time I knew him.3

What really stuck out that year was that I could talk to and work with adults who respected me and respected my skills. I had always known I was a pretty smart kid but I didn’t really believe it, if that makes sense. John was the person who got me to believe that I was smart and that it didn’t matter what rotten kids at school said or teachers thought or anything like that.

After all, I had “the gift.” It doesn’t matter at all whether that’s true now or whether it ever was. Dumbo needed a magic feather to fly. I needed my own version.

I returned to high school the next year and the transformation was rather amazing. The bullying and the nastiness didn’t really stop—at least, the attempts didn’t. The change was that I was now impervious. I didn’t care. Why should I? Why should anyone care what a bunch of rotten children think? In many ways I legitimately enjoyed my senior year as a result and had accumulated enough credits to graduate with my class despite missing a year.

A deep and extended, “Heeeeeeeeey!” was his standard greeting, and anyone who ever heard it knows. I heard it a lot less that year, but heard it every time I’d drop in nonetheless. I usually heard it more than once since I can’t think of a single time I met with John that another of member of that cast of characters4 wouldn’t show up for some reason and he’d exclaim again, almost always followed by a, “Hey Johnny!” I heard this exchange hundreds of times.

After graduating, I would go on to work with John multiple times at various stops from 1998 to 2013. He’s the reason I’m a programmer. He’s the person who encouraged that path. He opened no shortage of doors that allowed me to remain in the industry. John, in his way, ferried me through some of the roughest waters of my life well past and beyond the bullies of high school. He set me on a path that’s allowed me to provide for my own family years later.

I will miss him, a lot. Even near the end, when we’d talk about the considerable pain he was in, he always maintained the same jovial and upbeat nature I had known for all those decades. It’s sad that he was taken early, especially since the realities of my own adulthood and being a dad hadn’t left a lot of time to keep in touch.

“It’s fine. There will be time later.”

It’s the thing we always tell ourselves. If I’ve learned nothing else in my middle years it’s that no, there won’t necessarily be time later.

The day John died, before I knew, I was taking a walk with my son and coincidentally I was talking about John. “Is he that guy who let me play with that little computer at his house?”

“Yeah, you remember. That’s John.” I thought about him then and thought to myself, “I should probably call him. I haven’t talked to him since his birthday.” Unfortunately, life and kids did what life and kids do. By the time the day was done, it was late and I had forgotten.

The next morning, my wife (who still uses Facebook) would come into my office and ask, “Did you see the news about John?”

I hadn’t. And I hadn’t called either.

John’s religion was science, plain and simple. He was a preacher and an evangelist in that way. This is no exaggeration. At some point in my teens he dubbed himself my “Science Father” because, of course, being a “Godfather” would have been entirely against his deeply held religious beliefs!

A fitting title for such a nerd.

John was, and will always be, my Science Father and I remain, as he referred to me, his “backup son.”

May Science take you John. You never professed to believe in a hereafter, but I hope there is because I’d like to talk again.

I’m pretty sure they let nerds into heaven—I hope so anyway, for both our sakes.

  1. In the deep dark of 1994 email and texting were hardly commonplace. Long distance charges by the minute were still a thing. ↩

  2. I guess, in a sense, that’s extremely sappy now. ↩

  3. I have to include this somewhere. I didn’t love it shoved into the middle of the entry as an aside, so it’s been moved down here. Anyway, on those drives home John would often—in the deepest voice he could muster—sing, “Peeeeeenis,” out the open window on. Almost three decades later I still laugh remembering heading home on Eastern Ave and something inspiring him to do that and it remains something of an inside joke with my old high school friends. ↩

  4. It occurs to me that I had become one of those characters as well. ↩