Last night we’re shopping at Costco to get some fish oil (the pills for our health) and I while took a detour through the snack aisle I saw a familiar face I hadn’t seen in 11 years. Eric Stine, one of the nicest people I ever work with at PowerComputing! He was an amazing tech during my time there plus he always had a smile on his face, still does too. Eric and I had one thing in common that no one else in technical support ever achieved too…we were the only recipients of the Presidential Award for accomplishments in making PowerComputing’s technical support better. He was the man who nailed the System Folder/hard drive corruption issue plaguing the PowerCenters and PowerTowers. Legend has it, Eric spent a few weeks of his evenings attaching numerous combinations of SCSI devices to the affected computers until he could reproduce the problem 100 percent of the time; leave an external scanner connected but turned off. These days nobody has to sweat such a thing because most peripherals connect through USB which doesn’t generate “noise” for the hard drive to absorb. This feat earned him a well-deserved position in PowerComputing’s continuation engineering or something equivalent, it was a company making up things as it went.
I lost track of Eric after I bailed to be a contractor at NorTel. This resulted in a lot of chuckling between the two of us since we both know how badly things of gone for what used to be Canada’s pride and joy in the tech business (if you haven’t been reading the papers, NorTel went bankrupt and is in the process of being acquired by the Swedes). Kris told me he went to Anderson Consulting in Dallas which Eric stated was true but he returned to Austin pretty quickly like me. Afterwards, he worked for several creative companies and now currently works with VM Fusion. I quickly gave him my card because we need to talk on virtualization of the Mac OS.
We spent a big chunk of time gossiping about what happened to all our former comrades and their whereabouts. One guy is a VP at Disney now (whistle noise). I let him know about all of PCC folks continuing to work at Apple; there were a slug as the Nineties ended but few remain now. Eric remains in touch with a couple too. I inquired about a PCC reunion ever coming up. He said there were a few attempts in the past but I think many want to forget about it all as the last year of PCC was stressful, sad and devastating. I agree yet I would like to see how everyone is doing. I hope all my former co-workers landed on their feet, including those who irked me.
The hardest part of this weekend will be containing my excitement to tell Kris the news of running into Eric after this long.