I have worked with a lot of interesting people during my ten years as a computer support helpdesk analyst. Part of the reason I enjoyed my job to an extent had to do with the people I worked with. It was a lot like that television show you liked watching because all your favorite characters were on it.
A great number of those coworkers have either since quit, transferred to other departments, gone off to better paying jobs in the IT industry or were fired. The last in that group of colorful characters O knew was a guy named Greg Hehn.
Greg was the “grandfather of the crew” you might say because at 55, he was the oldest of everyone who worked in our IT department.
Everyone else, me included, are either still in college, already have college degrees or are older people who have had prior experience working at other helpdesks. What made Greg unique was he was the only person there, with the obvious exception of management, who absolutely loved his job.
Then again, Greg had worked in worse places, so he appreciated answering phone calls and troubleshooting computer hardware and software problems. He worked at Sears years before and was laid off. Prior to getting the IT job five years ago, he worked at 7-Eleven. He kept his 7-Eleven name badge posted on his cubicle wall to remind him (and everyone else) that there were worse places to be employed at.
To Greg, his cubicle was his second home.
“Every cubicle defines someone’s personality,” he once told me in response to my workspace, which had nothing, though at one time I did have my newspaper articles plastered along the walls. One wall of Greg’s cube was a bulletin board of pictures featuring him in many of his party going moods with his wife, sons, and two dachshunds, of which he was the proudest.
Greg made booklets for every single piece of hardware we trouble shot. Sometimes he even drew the covers that included one of him sleeping, which he sometimes did around two or three in the morning. Everyone would know it because we would hear snoring coming from his direction.
That was not all he added to the job.
He was his own disc jockey when it came to music. The entire department would be filled with the sounds of recording artists that included Bob Marley, Billy Joel, Elvis, Led Zeppelin, Neil Diamond, classical music, movie soundtracks, and tunes from the 1950s and 60s on weekends. The only artists he would never play were the ones he was forced to listen to as a kid because his parents liked them such as Frank Sinatra, Lawrence Welk, and Andy Williams.
Greg always kept up on the latest technology.
On his business card was the saying, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” He would buy a computer every year except for Apple, though if he had another kid, he would buy them an iMac. He wouldn’t, however, embrace DVD players until the recordable ones cable out or buy an HDTV (high density television) until the $5,000 price tag went down.
Greg was also an avid reader of books and read everything from the Clive Cussler adventure novels to murder mysteries written by obscure authors I had never heard of. He did not care much, however, for Tom Clancy, whose epic novels went off on tangents describing military technology and how government works, and he despised author James Michener. He told me once how he attempted to read Michener’s books, “Hawaii: A Novel”, and threw it down after reading the first twenty pages which talked about nothing but the sand and trees.
Greg had an excellent work ethic. When he was there, he was there to work and not fool around. He took about as many calls, if not more, as the rest of us.
When it came to customer service, Greg was the one who knew how to put out most of the fires. If someone on the night shift was ready to lose it when they were on a call, Greg was always there to take over.
He was the most outspoken of anyone on the weekend night shift. If everyone on the shift had a bad attitude, he had let us all know it and threaten to email management. He never did though.
“Still tongue makes a wise head,” he once told me.
He enjoyed talking with the store managers sometimes telling them stories about his younger days living in Hawaii (his family located often because his father was in the military) while the person on the other end of the phone was trying to trace a cable.
When there were no calls to answer during down times, Greg and I would talk about movies, television shows, and current events from the Elian Gonzalez controversy to gun violence in schools. Sometimes he’d talk about the wild dates he had with some of the women he dated in high school, which are either too graphic or too long to write about here.
It was Greg who convinced me to get back into writing again in 1998 after he read several of my film reviews I sent him via email. Until then, I was officially out of writing for newspapers because I had had enough of trigger-happy editors doing hatchet jobs to my reviews and columns leaving only the first two and last paragraphs and cutting out the rest.
I was looking forward to hearing his opinions on what he thought of my negative review of “What Lies Beneath” (2000) and if the Concorde jet crash in France marked the end of supersonic travel the week he unexpectedly left in July 2000. That never happened.
There are no more personal stories to hear now as Greg reveals to someone on the phone an interesting little tidbit about his past.
No music or snoring can be heard from where his “home” used to be. No more discussions about movies, television shows, women, or current events to help pass the time.
No one to put the fires out when someone loses it while trying to get a person on the phone to trace a cable.
The day Greg Hehn left was like seeing your favorite television show begin a new season without the character/actor who made the series worth watching.
By now, most everyone familiar with the events of 9/11 knows the story about what happened aboard United Airlines, Flight 93: how 30 plus passengers banded together in hopes of retaking a plane that was hijacked by four Al-Qaeda terrorists.
A movie adaptation of that flight titled “United 93” is due to hit theaters on April 28th, yet the trailer itself has already stirred up considerable controversy among movie-goers since its debut last month.
The four words that were remembered the most in the weeks after 9/11 were “We will never forget.” But that theme was quickly drowned out with shouts of “Too soon!” at Hollywood’s Grauman Chinese theater, according to an April 10, 2006 Newsweek article.
The article goes on to say that in Manhattan’s AMC Loews theater, a manager went so far as to pull the trailer after receiving multiple complaints from customers.
The theater manager reported that one of the customers was shedding tears.
“She was saying we shouldn’t have [played the trailer]. That this was wrong…I do not think people are ready for this,” the theater manager said.
United Flight 93’s journey ended tragically crashing in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The story of that flight is, however, an inspirational one about how a handful of adults, amid all the evil that had transpired that morning, chose to band together and fight back, win, or lose.
Seeing the film is not going to be by any means entertaining. I will cringe the moment I see the terrorists burst into the cockpit killing the pilots. That is the whole point in what movies do. They are made to stir up our emotions. Maybe getting audiences angry about what happened that fateful day is just what this country needs.
Times have changed in the five years since the attacks as well as our attitudes about 9/11, and it is not for the better. Other than those who lost loved ones that day, the rest of us have practically forgotten about what happened on that sunny Tuesday morning. Our patriotism, or lack thereof, when it comes to displaying our American pride and support for our armed forces has fallen back to what it was before 9/11.
Where are all those American flags people scrambled out to buy in the days following the attacks to hang outside their homes? The last time I saw members of Congress band together as a united group was the night of 9/11 as they sang “God Bless America.” The level of camaraderie between our congressional leadership has been in a disintegration spiral since that time.
On the first anniversary of the attacks, several churches held a memorial mass. The reason they stopped doing them as the years went by is because the rest of the country has moved on.
On 9/11, a sleeping giant was awakened in the hearts of Americans. Our asses got kicked that day by an enemy who had been warning us for years the day was coming when he and his twisted band of soulless murderers would bring their Holy War - “jihad” to American shores. We did not listen when the World Trade Center was attacked the first time in 1993. We didn’t listen when Osama bin Laden’s henchmen attacked the Kohbar Towers in Dhahran in 1996 and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000.
By the time emergency workers were finished carrying that final piece of steel from the World Trade Center, marking the end of clean-up at Ground Zero, we went right back into snooze mode. Like computers that have been left idle for ten minutes with no one to come back and shut them off.
Today, slipping across the border with a radioactive weapon is no more difficult than getting through airport gates with a sharp object.
Back when I was in high school, I used to laugh whenever I saw the film “Red Dawn” (1984), which showed the United States being attacked by foreign countries. Back then, the movie made no sense and had no basis in reality; now it is all too real. Today, the situation portrayed in that movie has certainly lost all traces of its humor.
If 9/11 failed to prove just how unprepared we are for a serious disaster, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina ought to have finally driven it home.
If nothing else, perhaps “United 93”, and any movies that come after it, will prove to audiences why five years later, American troops are still fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. Debate me all you want. America’s involvement in Iraq is a war on terror.
Here is hoping such somber dramas will remind us that unless this country learns from its past mistakes, another 9/11 will happen again.
Over the past year, we have the seen the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the ominous news from weather forecasters that this year's hurricane season is likely to be even more destructive.
Add last year's tsunami disaster, the earthquakes in the Middle East, this year's flooding in California, the drought that's been spawning Texas wildfires, the Bird Flu pandemic, and a possible nuclear showdown (Do the words, "World War III" come to mind?) with Iran to the mix and the picture seems even bleaker.
As if that isn't enough, in the past few years sightings of the Virgin Mary have been reported all over the United States and around the world.
Most, if not all religious people who think the Apocalypse is upon us, believe these to be signs that we're truly living in the end times.
Authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins have been writing about the judgment day concept since 1995 in their million-dollar franchise of "Left Behind" novels. That is, namely, devout followers of the Lord will one day suddenly disappear without a trace throughout the world while the rest of us sinners are "left behind" to contend with the Apocalypse.
I suppose given the way things are I can understand where some people might be coming from. All you must do is turn on the news or browse the Internet to read and see all is not right in the world now and is getting worse.
But it is not just the depressing news events. The list of immoralities this country and the world have engages in is endless. States approve abortion and same-sex marriages while debates are held on whether to take prayer out of schools, take "God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance and take down the Ten Commandments from the walls of city buildings.
"Surely God is mad at America," Mayor Ray Nagin said on Jan. 17, in what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr's seventy-seventh birthday.
"He sent us hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country," Nagin said. "Surely he doesn't approve of us being in Iraq under false pretenses. But surely, he is upset at Black America also. We are not taking care of ourselves."
Now, being Catholic, I will be the first to admit that although I do go to church on a more regular basis now, I have not exactly lived my life as God would prefer it. But I see nothing positive in seeing today's events as signs that "The Day" is coming. What is so positive about being excited that life is going to end?
When it comes to the Apocalypse, I have always believed ¬ based on science - life as we know it will end when our sun dies and engulfs half, if not all, the planets within our solar system, which isn't supposed to happen for another five billion years.
I would like to think that when that time comes, “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” aside, technology will provide us with the 'ark' we need to travel to other planets outside our own galaxy.
Although I am a believer in the supernatural, I find it a little hard to accept that a final battle will one day be waged here during Earth's last days between the forces of good and evil and that Jesus will again rise from the dead to save our souls, if you have read the Book of Revelation.
Then again, if you believe in the writings of The Old Testament, the last time God threw a fit with how people were living their lives, he told Noah to build a boat.
Forget the end of the world.
As far as I'm concerned, it's when our own life ends that matters; and since none of us knows when that is going to happen, maybe we need to start preparing now so we won't have to worry where we're headed when our own personal judgment day comes.
