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.
Things haven’t been the same since.
©9/20/06
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