Today one of my very favorite people is leaving the company that we have worked for, fought for, sweat for, cried and sacrificed for together. I’ve been here 4.5 years. He’s been here about a year longer than me.

Most techs don’t deal well with emotions. The longer I’m in this industry, the more I’m convinced that a lot of us are boarder-line alcoholics because we both don’t know how to deal with our stress levels, and don’t know how to deal with our emotions. (That’s probably true for a lot of professions, but this one I know for sure.) And my eyes are wet. So I’m gonna write it out.

Jay was an amazing mentor when I first hired in. I knew almost nothing about Linux (which is crazy to think about). All I had was customer service, and even that waned when I got so frustrated at not knowing what I needed to know. Jay took very good care of me in those first few months. He talked me through fixing so much, and fed me information as quickly as I could gobble it up. … and he wasn’t even in training yet.

As he and I both worked up through the ranks, and worked together to make this company better than it thought it could be, we started taking trips to get coffee. It was a small thing, but it ended up being one of the defining moments of our weeks: coffee together. We bitched, we problem solved, we discussed, we congratulated.

More than that, though, we supported. If there was a question to which I didn’t have an answer, Jay was my man.

I have been touched by Jay’s kindness, his genuine-ness, and his enthusiasm. Even though he and I do not interact as much as we did when we were in the same building, I am scared that without him in my day-to-day life I will fall short of what I can achieve. Now that he’s moving on to bigger and better things, I’m wondering how many people will fall short because he’s not around as much.

To avoid it negatively affecting people, I am going to hold myself to a higher standard: I will be as kind, genuine, and enthusiastic as Jay has always been to me, to everyone I encounter every day.

<3 you Jay. Let’s coffee soon.