Losing people, finding people

Bizarre. Through Web 2.0, miracle of the steam age, I’m reunited with John Craig. Back in the day, we were 20-something programmers at I.P. Sharp Associates. We worked together on a management-accounting system for the Reckitt & Colman Group, for whom I’d just finished work on a statutory accounting system. We worked closely then, but I doubt I’ve seen or heard from him in thirty years. Suddenly we’re talking again and collaborating on a system rebuild. And I’m here in Denmark, working on a system that is largely, yes, you did guess it, management accounting.

Gets worse. This afternoon I get a reply to an email I sent 9½ years ago. Don’t drop that old email address. People do get around to answering you. So I’m in touch again with cosmopolitan and ubiquitous Hal “Ubi Roi” Carim, whose notoriously aerial roots are currently sucking the Seine in Paris. It’s a smaller world than the one I grew up in.

Except in Denmark, that was always small. Does “bounded in a nutshell” ring any bells? No, wait a minute. Story I want to tell you. About meeting people.

C. already had a man when she met her husband. She was on her way home by train and thinking about what she wanted in a man. A handyman, she thought, What I need is a handyman. And there is one. Asleep, mind you, but look at him: a handyman. Then he woke up and looked at her. And asked for her phone number. And got off the train. She went home and told her man she had met someone and was going to leave. “What’s his name?” her man asked. “I don’t know,” she answered, “but he’s got my phone number.” And that’s who she’s been with since. Not a handyman; though, a philosopher.