I typically try to avoid funerals and weddings, but specifically funerals.
Unfortunately, today, I really didn't have an option.
And you may be thinking, well, everybody has an option, right?
You can just not go.
And that's true.
And I would have hated myself if I had not gone to this particular funeral.
Now, to get you caught up, and I'm going to try to do this without using any names because they're friends of mine and I'm not getting the sign off for me to even mention their names.
I'm fairly confident they wouldn't care, but I'm just not going to do it.
So, in 1999, I had the opportunity to get into a field that I had been so desperately
wanting to get into, and that was anything dealing with being an ISP.
And in this particular instance, it was broadband, cable broadband.
The city of Tifton was launching its own cable broadband department.
Because they had gone to the incumbents, said, hey, look, we'll put in the fiber infrastructure.
We need some kind of corporation agreement, and it needs to be a win-win for everybody.
And I think they approached Bell South, and I want to say TCI, might have been AT&T.
honestly, I can't remember. But none of those deals were win-wins. They were definitely a win
for the cable company or the telecommunications company, but not for the city of Tifton and not
necessarily for the citizens either. And around about that time, a lot of municipalities and
county governments were rolling their own broadband initiatives, and the city of Tifton
decided to do the same thing. Now, they screwed it up because they hired a consultant who turned
out to be a snake in the grass, and so the business plan was flawed from day one, but that
wasn't something that was apparent until all the money had been procured and spent, and this damn
thing had to had to run so i hired in i want to think it was september 27 1999 i was the network
manager so my responsibility was going to be managing the cable modem deployments i had a
guy that was working for me that actually went out because at this point it was it was kind of
like a two-visit deal. So if you didn't already have cable with the company, and the company being
CityNet, City of Tifton, then the cable tech had to go out, had to get the cable installed in your
house, and verify that it would carry the necessary signals for the cable modem. Then my tech would go
out and actually place the cable modem and then install a network adapter in the computer because
you need to keep in mind nowadays all computers all desktop computers come with ethernet ports
hell a lot of them now come with not not just a gig but they come with two and a half gig
You can get some that have 5 gig.
But back in 99, it was very, very uncommon to have a desktop PC and even a laptop have
some form of networking capability.
Even laptops, you usually had to add a PCMCIA card to get Wi-Fi connectivity.
And we're talking about 802.11b at the time, all right?
And so that was the process.
And somewhere along the line, we hooked up this guy's service at his house.
And I'd never met him before, didn't know who the hell he was.
And he managed to get to me one day and basically tell me that there was something wrong with our network.
And I'm thinking, the hubris, the balls on this individual, right?
And the funny thing is, is at the time, we were getting our internet connectivity from another, it was kind of like a co-op that was the Thomas Phil Cairo Camilla co-op for providing broadband down there.
And we had four T1 circuits that were bonded, and they were providing our internet connectivity, our DNS.
Well, technically, no, they provided—we bought equipment from them.
We bought the CMTS, the Cable Modem Termination System, which was a Cisco 7200 at the time.
It was a small one.
And the Cisco CNR, which basically handed out the cable modem profiles
and the DHCP IP addresses to the endpoints and all that other kind of stuff.
And the way they did their network, though, is everything was private.
They had this big-ass firewall.
And if you – the cable modems by design were supposed to get private IP addresses,
usually in the 172 dot whatever range because that was a class b and the endpoints would normally get
a publicly addressable ip address and you know that the endpoint was normally a router a firewall
something like that if you were adventurous then yeah connected directly to your pc and how and see
how quickly you got, you got owned. But in their original network design, they basically had the
cable modems and the endpoints on the, in the same subnet, which is not the way it was supposed to
work. And the other thing that was irritating in this setup was the fact that if you needed
a static IP, then we would have to submit a request to their network engineer,
And he would basically have to punch a hole, whatever, basically do a one-to-one NAT through
their firewall of whatever public IP address they next had available for static assignment
and then punch that through to the internal 172.whatever IP address that it was.
Years later, especially when we got away from them, I mean, they were great people.
They did our tech support and everything, but we eventually took over our own tech support.
We eventually got our own circuits through Georgia Public Web, GPW, out of Atlanta, and our network was configured the correct way.
But the funny thing is, is when this guy that we had just hooked up, he got to me and he said, I think your network's screwed up.
It's not set up right.
And so when I took that back to the network engineer down in Thomasville,
of course, you know, us IT people, our shit don't stink.
So we're like, who is this guy to tell me that this setup is not correct?
Eventually, they acquiesced and admitted that it was fucked up.
So they straightened it out.
And the weird, the funniest thing about this was this guy figured it out
using Linux, of all things.
Little did I know that that original phone call, which then eventually turned into us going and having lunch together, which when I saw this guy, I was like, who the fuck is this guy?
He was a scary-looking motherfucker.
But little did I know that this guy would turn out to be almost like a brother to me because I eventually hired him.
He was a registered nurse, and he was a traveling nurse, a contract nurse.
So he wasn't assigned to any one hospital.
He would go to wherever the jobs were, whether that was in South Georgia, North Georgia, North Florida, whatever.
That's what he would do, but he was burning out on that.
And so we had an opportunity.
I needed some help, so we basically had an opportunity to hire somebody,
and I managed to get him in the door for about $15 to $18 an hour or something at the time.
Remember, this would have been December of 2000 by this point.
And he turned out to be such an asset.
He was self-taught when it came to programming.
For whatever reason, he gravitated toward PEARL, and so our internal cable modem management system we called COMMS, which was the CityNet Online Management System, I think is the acronym we came up with, completely written in PEARL, but he designed it in such a way that we could go in.
Because we were having to do all this other stuff by hand, you know, assign the profile, find the MAC address for a modem, assign the profile, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But here we had a system where we had the client record, we could attach the cable modem to it, and then it would use SSH to configure the CNR profile, static assignments, and all that kind of stuff.
And eventually when we started offering VoIP services, he integrated that into it too.
and you know we grew and we grew and I eventually became the supervisor and then the general manager
by April of 2004 I was made the director of telecommunications for the city of Tifton
i.e. I was in charge of CityNet and the MIS department for the city of Tifton
this guy worked for me as my IT manager over CityNet as well as the MIS department and then
we had another guy that we hired in basically right out of college. He had an associate's degree
in computer science or something like that. And he wound up running our tech support department
for CityNet and also being kind of like the go-to guy for managing and assisting with stuff in the
MIS department for the rest of the city of Tifton. Because we had 14 buildings that were connected
in the city of Tifton via fiber.
And originally the phone system
was an ATM-based phone system.
It was a product called Spherical.
And we had a core ATM switch at the head end
and then we had all of these ATM switches.
They were, I want to say they were 2810s.
They were ATM switches, but they had a card slot.
You put that in and it would give you
Ethernet capabilities.
So you could come off of that
and go to a regular Ethernet switch.
Trust me, when we got the opportunity to shit-can all that stuff,
because Spirit Call finally got to the point where they supported SIP
instead of, I think it was MGC or something like that,
we took that opportunity and just shit-canned every bit of that ATM gear.
It was, I hated working on that stuff, and I'd never worked on ATM gear before.
Well, at the same time, we all got, I was the first one to actually get into it,
but two weeks before World of Warcraft was officially launched,
I got into the last of the open beta.
And once I started playing that,
we had already had a great time playing this space MMORPG called Earth and Beyond.
It was fantastic.
But it petered out fairly quickly and died.
And then World of Warcraft came along, and I mean, it was just like...
I mean, we'd already played like Warcraft 2 and stuff like that.
I'd never played Warcraft 3, but it was just game-changing for me.
It was like I'd been transported to another world.
And then I got him involved in it, and then I got our tech support guy involved in it,
and my wife was involved in it, and all my kids were playing,
And there were many, many, many, many years on Friday and Saturday nights
that we were up to all hours of the night, and especially two of us,
me and this particular friend, the IT manager, we were constantly drinking.
The tech guy, the tech supervisor guy didn't drink.
He had tried it early on in his life and said, that's not for me.
And we just had a shit ton of fun.
And I mean, we were nerds and geeks, so we all had IP phones on our desks that were connected
over a VPN to the city's phone service, so we could literally just conference each other.
We didn't have to worry about using TeamSpeak or Roger Wilco or, oh God, what was the other
big one?
Mumble came along.
We didn't have to use any of those.
We were on IP phones.
And even back whenever I was only on DSL
because I lived in Ben Hill County
and I'd not made it over here to get faster internet speeds.
But it was just a lot of fun.
A lot of fun.
A lot of late night hours.
A lot of drinking.
I mean, I remember when we first started playing.
And again, we didn't move over here to Tifton until 2006.
We started playing World of Warcraft November of 2004.
Really got into it heavy because during the Christmas season,
that was when my team manager and my tech guy got into it as well,
and my wife too.
And so we were still living in Fitzgerald at the time,
and I don't know, there was just something about the fact
that I was 35, 40 miles away from these guys
and could still communicate and we could still kind of get together
and play. And then I had one of my oldest friends got into it. He'd been a EverQuest guy. He got
big into World of Warcraft and man, it was, it was just, there's a lot of fond memories there.
A lot of fond memories, a lot of memories where I was a complete asshole because I drank too much,
But all of that came rushing back today because I went to his wife's funeral.
My old friend, my IT manager, old friend, his wife passed away last Thursday from cancer.
I found out last October that she was dealing with, I'm pretty sure it was colon cancer.
And he let me know last Tuesday, just out of the blue, that he had put her in hospice.
And I told him then how sorry I was and how shitty I felt
because I kept meaning to reach out and find out how they all were doing.
And something would come up.
One thing or another would come up, and I just wouldn't do it.
I'd put it off.
And then I get that text message that Tuesday,
and then I get the text message that Thursday night that she had passed away
and she was with Lord Jesus.
Because he's a religious guy.
I mean, he believes in God and all of that.
Of course, I don't, and he knows that.
But I went for him today, and it was a nice service.
Too preachy for me, too many songs, but it wasn't about me.
It was about him and his family.
Because, see, this man, he married a woman who already had two kids.
He has never fathered any children of his own, not that we know of.
But, you know, he became a father to them.
And so a girl and a boy, the girl's 22, the boy's 21.
The girl is actually married and pregnant, and I believe she's supposed to deliver in like two months or something.
So unfortunately, her mother did not stay alive long enough to see the birth of her first grandchild, and that in itself is sad.
And I finally got to talk to him today and then reminiscing with my tech support guy and his wife and their kids and just this avalanche of emotions and this pain in the, kind of like in the solar plexus region of my chest.
It's something I haven't been able to shake since I got back.
And I know I say this, I've got more years behind me than I have in front of me.
And I even expressed this to my wife a couple of days ago, might have been yesterday actually,
that with the passing of his wife, it just, it flipped something in me.
It was like, it was the end of an era.
And I even mentioned that while I was standing there with everybody.
That it was an end of an era.
And it was so funny because I literally have not laid eyes on any of these people
in over a decade and a half or about a decade and a half i left the job in august or july of 2012
i think my it manager guy and his wife which i don't think they were married at the time
but he showed up here sometime i want to say in 2013 for my wife because she's a seamstress to fix
something to do with his seat on his motorcycle that's the last time i i laid eyes on these people
uh the tech support guy last time i think i saw him was when he and the it manager
brought me some of my stuff the day that i was let go
from the company that we were all working for in 2012
we'd have phone conversations you know they both continued to work for the company they both left
somewhere around 2018, 2019.
Actually, it might have been around 2020 because I think one of them was COVID-related.
One of them refused to take the vaccine, and the other one just had an opportunity to go
do something else that was a job that his father had done before as a groundskeeper at
church. So I would talk to him. I literally have not talked to my tech support guy in years.
So it was really, really, really good to see him. And it's so funny, his wife,
sweet woman, talk your ear off, but she was like, we got to start getting back together and all this
other kind of stuff. And I think she was misremembering that their two households are like
a stone's throw away from each other. And so I vaguely remember that they used to on Wednesday
evenings, they would get together and like maybe play board games or something like that. I don't
remember. My wife and I were never part of that because we literally live on the other side of the
county. They're on the west side of the county. We're on the east side of the county.
So it takes about 15 to 20 minutes to get from here to there.
I mean, that's not a long drive, but I think she was misremembering
because we were never part of those.
But, yeah, it's, I went for him.
I'm glad I went, and he was glad that I came.
Because when he finally recognized, you know, after the service was over and everybody was
exiting and they were going into the foyer area, and a lot of people were walking up to
him and shaking his hand and wishing him his condolences and all that kind of stuff, I
walked up and I stood and I looked at him.
And he looked at me, and it took him a second to recognize that his old friend Donovan was
standing in front of him, and we shook hands and embraced.
You know, there's very few people that I will say that I actually love.
You know, my wife, my kids.
I loved my parents when they were still around.
I like my in-laws.
I don't necessarily love them.
But I love this guy.
I really do.
I love this guy.
He's like a brother to me.
And even though we've drifted apart, seeing him the way I saw him today hurt.
And as I explained to my wife when I got back home, I said, you know, I'm an emotionally guarded person.
And she just kind of looked at me.
I said, you know, you may not know this about me after 36-plus years,
but, you know, I'm an emotionally guarded person.
And this one is tough.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know what my point was here.
I just needed to talk it out, I guess.
And I'm also going to give some advice that I need to take for myself,
but I probably won't, and that's at the bare minimum.
If you have a long-standing friendship that starts drifting away
because you no longer do the same things that you once did,
you no longer work together, that kind of stuff,
make it a point to, I would say, talk to them at least once every two weeks,
once a month, try to see him a couple of times during the year, because there's no telling.
His wife was 54. 54 and died of colon cancer. I'm 56. He's either 53 or 54.
You never know.
You can wake up one morning and you get a text or a call
that your best buddy, your old friend that you haven't spoken to in six months
and you haven't seen in 13 years has passed beyond the veil.
I guess I'm just feeling a little nostalgic and a little sad and a little down.
So I wanted to share that misery with you.
Anyway, I hope you're doing well.
Hug your loved ones.
If you haven't spoken to one of your old friends in quite a while, make it a point.
Call them.
And if you're able to and you live in the same area,
try to meet up with them and talk face-to-face a couple of times,
maybe three to four times, once every three or four months, something.
Because you're going to regret it if you don't.
And you wake up one morning and you get that text that they're gone.
Anyway, thank you for taking the time to listen.
I'm sorry for this, you know, being such a downer.
I'm just riffing.
I'm just verbal dysentery.
Raw emotions right here, but still guarded.
But I needed to get it off my chest.
Anyway, talk to you in the next one.