A colleague retires, maybe!

Joe has a proclivity towards proving people wrong.  He did that to me - almost effortlessly- a few years ago while we were in programming re-training class.  I was talking to him about an article I had read and scoffed at its premise that most people will have 4-6 careers in their working lifetime.  Joe dismissed my contention by simply pointing out that he himself was going on to his fourth career.  The proving people wrong business comes naturally to people like him who have done so much and studied even more. Now Joe has declared that this is the end of his working life, but one can never be sure.  He is a very curious person and something might come up that he might want to try. Like trucking!

Most people who know Joe – as a programmer, as a chemist or because of his other occupations or avocations - would never think he would be interested in trucking.  And they will be wrong. I remember going over some trucking magazines with him, discussing what some of the unfamiliar terminology actually meant.  Well, speculating on their meaning was fun, but Joe's curiosity got the better of him and he actually called one of the advertisers to ask what they meant by "no-slip seating".  It turned out it had nothing to do with the type of driver's seats their trucks had.  It is actually a scheduling term used in that business.  A chemist with this kind of diverse knowledge is very hard to find.

I remember when Joe called a syndicated columnist about a word she had used in her column.  He had to leave her a message, and we all thought we were never going to hear from her.  But Joe's message, or more likely his staid and thoughtful delivery was enough for this semi-famous person to call back immediately. He had left the impression that some very important work in our highly critical place of business had come to a halt because all intellectual skills were now directed towards figuring out the correct meaning and usage of this word.  True, we were involved in Y2K work then and by most accounts in the popular media, we were saving the world. But to most of us this was a little over the top. However it did elicit a call back from the columnist who gave Joe the meaning, the usage and a reference to a well regarded dictionary. Subsequently most of the team went back to the critical work of discussing why we were unable to find this word on the internet.

Joe is also an avid collector of Amateur Radio equipment and will go to any length to acquire a model he craves.  He would frequently put such model numbers in the signature of his emails.  To the uninitiated, like me, it was just gibberish.  I asked him if such arcane solicitations were useful.  He replied people who didn't understand would simply ignore it while to the small minority to which it was directed it would make perfect sense.  You can only marvel at the power yet simplicity of such an argument.  You might think that his hobby is a bit outdated, but if you asked him he would argue that radios are still the latest rage in technology. Cell phones and wireless networks are nothing but glorified radios.

I also learned from Joe that garages are bad for automobiles, especially in the cold climes, like the one we live in.  His explanation is based on chemistry - something to do with chemical reactions of salt and metal when a cold automobile warms up in a garage.  His reasoning makes sense to the twenty minutes worth of distillate - or more appropriately residue - of several semesters of chemistry left in my brain.  Anyway, garages have better uses, like storing Amateur Radio equipment.