Make new colleagues but keep the old

I had lunch last week with four former colleagues. We had last worked together more than twenty years ago, but had all stayed in light contact over the years. The last time we were all together was at my husband’s memorial service, five years back. When someone or something came up, there might be an email or LinkedIn exchange. I’d seen most of them once or twice since Jim’s service. But that was about it.

Our shared experience was at a wacky little company where I spent nearly 10 years.

I’d been there for quite a few years before any of these fellows joined. I’m not sure what our joint tenure was: three years? five years?

In any case, we were all pretty tight when we worked together. It was a small company, so you knew everyone, but some colleagues became better buds than others. These guys were all on the better buds list – some better than others.

One of the guys, George (who remains just about the funniest, laugh-out-loud person I’ve ever known) had been my “work husband”, the man at work I was tightest with. We had lunch pretty much every day. And over the years, we got in the habit of George calling me while he was commuting in to work. (I was an earlier arrival than he was.) We’d chew over what was up – we were both on the management team, which doesn’t take much to achieve in a small company. We’d trade speculation, indulge in a bit of gossip. He called me once from the hospital where his wife was in labor. He assured me that she was dozing, but I refused to talk to him. Enough was enough!

On occasion, we went on business trips. The most memorable was a trip to central Illinois, where, among other things, we called on a client – we ate in the company caf, where they served several jello mold options. My mother would have loved it. 

But the jello wasn’t what made the trip so memorable.

The trip was winding down on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, and as we drove through the soybean fields on our way back to O’Hare, we tried to tune in AM stations along the way to get the news. We caught snatches, and just didn’t know what to make of it. Someone had blown up a pre-school? What???

Andy was the boss man – the president of the company. I left the company when he fired me. We were planning a dire-necessity layoff, and Andy and I were having a disagreement on how we were going to position the layoff to the survivors. Our disagreement ended with me telling him “you say what you’re going to say, I’ll say what I’m going to say, and we’ll see who they believe.” Oops. Not the wisest thing to say if I wanted to keep my job.

I didn’t speak to him for a while, but about a year after he fired me – and he was tossed by the company that had acquired our little outfit about a month after he riffed me – someone put together an alumni dinner and we did the work equivalent of kiss and make up.

The other two guys – Rob and Brian – were both salesmen, and I’d worked with them on deals, staffed trade shows, gone on calls, etc.. I can count on one hand – maybe a hand plus a couple of fingers - the number of sales folks I actually enjoyed working with over the years – and yes, dear V, you are one of them! – and both Rob and Brian (another person with an excellent sense of humor) are on the short list.

During my full-time career, I specialized in crazy, generally dysfunctional companies. Maybe every company is, but the places I worked all had an special edge. I was obviously drawn to the intrigue and the meshugas.

This particular company was dysfunction off the charts. We’d blown $40M in investment – this in an era when $40M sunk into a pokey software company (however brilliant the techies, and ours were plenty brilliant) was a huge amount of money.

When our lunch gang of five was all there together, the spigot had pretty much been shut off. Occasional we got a trickle of cash, but mostly we were on our own.

Our function was survival, and, dammit, we were pretty good at it. Until we weren’t.

Thanks to Andy, we’d been acquired, but the acquiring firm wasn’t interested in investing in us. A hardware company that was eager to get into the software biz, they wanted us to merge our technology with that of some skunkworks they had going.

Our principal product was what we termed “robust”, “industrial strength”. Just another way of saying it was brutal to use, and there were only about three people in the world who could actually succeed with it without a brain transplant and/or our services team doing all the work for them.

As it turned out, the skunkworks technology the acquiring company tried to foist onto us was – quite unimaginably – even uglier and harder to use than our baby. The merger of these two products never occurred.

But even though we disappointed our new owners by not consummating the technology marriage, we were survivors. And we survived by getting enough companies to buy our software. Until we weren’t able to get enough companies to buy our software.

Ah, the good old days…

At lunch, we shared war stories – and we all had plenty of them.

I can’t remember when I’ve laughed so long and so hard.

Sometimes, we didn’t even need to tell the stories.

All someone had to do was say the “magic word” – Zamboni, R2D2, Roll Tide, drooping fudgsicle, The Decordova, mullet; mention a name - and we’d all just burst out laughing.

Some of the stories were of the ‘had to be there’ variety. But some were just good stories.

Here’s one of mine:

Our VP of development was a very nice guy who hated to make presentations – way out of his comfort zone. But for our user group, he really needed to get up there and talk about ‘what next’ for our product. I.e., what we were going to do to it that would somewhat improve it, at least to the level where someone would choose our product over getting poked in the eye with a sharp stick.

Anyway, I helped Marty pull together his preso, coached him, rehearsed him, etc.

At the management meeting after the user group, Marty thanked me for being “such a good wet nurse.” (You need to know two things: I was the only woman on the management team; and during our meetings, Marty was almost always doodling nose cones and other breast-like images.)

Wetnurse! Wetnurse? My response: “If I were going to pick a wetnurse, it wouldn’t be someone over 40 who’d never had a kid.”

“Help me out here,” Marty said (whined, actually), “What’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Nursemaid, Marty.”

As you get older, the conversations often take a  backward look. You’re with family, old friends, old colleagues, and you just start in on the reminiscence.

We left agreeing that we wouldn’t wait so long to do it again.

It was a total hoot, and we just tapped a few of the stories.

Looking forward to the next meetup.

Make new colleagues, but keep the old. One is silver, but the other gold.

These guys are definitely gold…