So I’m sitting in my office sending e-mails when I get a phone call from a co-worker asking when was the last time I talked to Pat. Hmmm…yesterday around 2 p.m. We were discussing the merits of Mythbuntu vs. MacMini for streaming video, why do you ask? Ummm, because a friend of Pat’s just got a call that he died.
Riiight. Pat is the sort of person who is a master at extricating himself from sticky situations and turning every problem into an opportunity. This is a bad joke or part of some elaborate scheme to get out of paying his student loans.
If only that were the case. Instead, it soon became clear that Pat had indeed passed away. He was only 25. Goddamit.
I first met Pat at the end of 2003 when I hired him as a student assistant to help manage the various videoconference rooms I was responsible for at the time. I had Googled him after his interview and found some news story about how he had made a duct tape outfit for prom and thought he sounded like someone who would be fun to work with. And that was certainly the case.
Pat knew a lot about computers and various technologies, but his real gift was hacking pretty much any sort of social system. Pat always knew, for example, how he could game the University parking services system so that the profuse number of tickets he received would always end up voided. When the rental car agency forgot to fill in the date for the one-day university parking pass, Pat scanned and Photoshopped it and used it for months to park in employee spaces.
Pat always seemed to be working some sort of scheme or another. He got everyone in the office addicted to World of Warcraft and then quit abruptly to play Eve Online because he figured he could make money by farming and then selling the in-game currency. Another time he spent a few weeks having a computer chew through lottery numbers from various state systems to see if he could find any that had the slightest hint of nonrandomness — and he did it as a class project, so he got credit for it!
Pat was also an inveterate joker. I bought everyone in my office nerf guns one year, and Pat wielded his with gusto, organizing occasional nerf raids on the office of another co-worker. When that co-worker went on vacation once, Pat hid a small device in the drop ceiling of the co-worker’s office that would randomly chirp which had the intended effect of driving the co-worker appropriately crazy. And occasionally we’d come up with something suitable to get him back. For awhile, Pat would call local stores first thing in the morning to see if they had any Wii’s in stock hoping he could buy one and sell it on eBay. At another co-workers suggestion, one day we made a copy of his list only we substituted the numbers of local women’s wear stores and other.
Pat had graduated and stopped working for me back in August. He’d IM me occasionally to keep me apprised of his job search efforts and to tip me off to websites he knew I’d find interesting. He had finally found a job he seemed to like, and moved out to Colorado just a couple months ago. He’d IM me to brag about what an improvement Denver was over Kalamazoo.
Pat may have only gotten 25 years, but he certainly knew how to squeeze as much experience and living as possible into that brief time.