Bryant at his new digs in Austin
For well over a year, my e-mail had been bouncing whenever I tried to contact my friend and co-worker Bryant Beck over in France. It wasn’t just our work addresses, but even the personal stuff through our .Mac accounts. Being an employee of a Fortune 500 company, my first instinct was dread and sadness because he may have laid off while over there. Fortunately, he was still in the employee directory and his immediate supervisor in California said he existed. Then I put in a ticket with Apple’s IT department, even provided a copy of the bounced messages. IT blew it off as saying Bryant was ignoring me. Guess they didn’t read it since it stated the recipient didn’t exist in the mail server.
Not a problem anymore. Bryant moved back to Austin this week! After four years of working at Apple’s set up in Paris, he and his family returned but they’re in Round Rock this time, not Austin. It is great to see him and hopefully we can continue our weekly lunches at Whataburger. It’ll be the new one up on Parmer Lane, not the older place off of Cameron or on the Braker Lane exit. I have so many questions about his four years there.
You’re probably asking yourselves, doesn’t Bryant drive you crazy some days? Not really, you’re probably thinking of other Republicans and those who really are Republicans but won’t fess up to it. Bryant is more of a Contrarian yet a more intellectually honest one. Besides, our friendship isn’t caught up in feuds over who the worst president in modern history is or which economic system is better than the other. He’s my age (older by a matter of weeks), he grew up in Idaho, I lived in North Dakota for a year so I have an inkling of what “rural” life in America was like in the 80s and there’s many other qualities I like about the guy. Personally, I think we get along better with each other because I proposed this theory based upon one of my favorite novels (The Scarlet Letter) one day after one of our many debates, okay, it was an argument. Bryant is Reverend Dimmesdale because he is a well-educated dude of faith yet he doesn’t have any illegitimate children with Hester or anyone else. I am Roger Chillingworth, Dimmesdale’s opposite, a person of science and rather secular but I’m not secretly poisoning anyone, trying to find out who the father of Pearl is. Bryant laughed at it. Maybe he didn’t like the book or he watched the horrible Demi Moore version. It’s just silliness anyway or is it? James Carville is married to Mary Matlin. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are friends. How could us being friends be weird then? It’s just great to have him back and someone who understands my butchered French.