Why this kolaveri?

This is the third time I am writing this post! Wow! The person mentioned here must be something! :D Or maybe, this is symbolic of my growing maturity :P The first time, I was angry and frustrated. After a few days, I calmed down, but still felt hurt. Finally, today I can look back and smile at the wonderful moments I had.

I work on NIC and iSCSI boot drivers. So, most of our issues start with system doesn’t boot, which means you cannot do anything more, automatically achieving the P1 status! During one such critical issue, I had to work with a guy from Costa Mesa. Let’s call him Ryan (I like this name better than the one he has). This issue was getting very hot with the clients and the upper management wanted results, immediately. We have very minimal debugging tools here, honestly speaking, none. So, we have to entirely rely on our gut feeling. This obviously needs a lot of experience and sound knowledge, which I happen to lack. And that is why I was suggested to work with Ryan, who was already analyzing this issue.

I was under a lot of pressure and I woke up early (evening for them) to ping him on chat. I was nervous since Ryan is also one of the top guys and he had not replied to my mail. Surprisingly, he replied immediately. He expressed concern over me getting up early just to work on an issue. He punctuated it with a smiley! That’s right. He put this :) And I knew, I would have no problems working with this guy. We got working on the issue and Ryan even stayed up the next day, just to help me.

I have to give it to him. He is a great guy. Despite the miles between us, he sensed that I was totally freaked out and gave me a day off, just to compose myself. Unlike many others I have worked with, he would keep up a friendly banter which kept me awake during the late hours. This showed in our work and we were able to root cause the issue within two days. It turned out to be somebody else’s mistake!! But the deal wasn’t bad because I had found a very good friend. Ryan is a very humble man. Absolutely modest and down-to-earth. What I like the most about him is his sense of humor. Ryan not only comes up with good ones himself but also has the rare virtue of being able to take a joke on him. He would also laugh at all my jokes, good, bad and ugly. 

The issue was resolved, but we continued to stay in touch. He called me his 3 am friend. He even told me about his evil MIL! :D He loves his wife and daughters and I am proud of him for that. I would in turn tell him about my work and my life. This was going good. And then, somehow he stopped talking to me. Yeah, I don’t know why, but he stopped answering my pings. This was strange because, no matter how busy he was, he would always make time to reply to me. He would tell me if he was busy and we would plan to talk some other day. I ignored his ignoring me for some time, assuming he must be on a really tight schedule. However, he never tried to contact me. Honestly, I don’t know what went wrong, no idea whether I had hurt him or upset him in any way. Ryan believed in talking out things to sort them. Somehow, he must have felt that I did not need an explanation.

Ryan, you will always remain one of my good friends. However it ended, I will at least not regret that I did not attempt to revive our friendship.