Ry is gone

heavy sigh

Ry is now working for Microsoft (see also this posting) again. We became acquainted with each other while working at MS via the MS Gun Club (MSGC) in the late 90’s.  We only met once (which I don’t remember) but saw a lot of each other’s posting in the MSGC public folder.  We were both contractors at MS and Ry had other contracts he worked on in the bay area between his MS gigs.  It was because of me living in Moscow, Idaho that Ry decided to check out the town as a place for him to raise his family.  He drove over for a visit, looked around, and moved his family there.  I still didn’t meet him.  It was at least a couple years later that I was reading a magazine while waiting to get on a plane at SeaTac (Seattle Tacoma airport) to come home to Idaho for the weekend from my job at Chromium.  This guy asks me, “Are you Joe Huffman?”  I confirmed his hunch and asked who he was and how he knew.  It was Ry. He said it was because I looked familiar, it was the gate for a plane to go to the Pullman-Moscow airport, my hat, and I was reading Precision Shooting.  We talked while waiting for the plane and I was thrilled.  He is so smart and so funny.  It was great.  He had just finished an interview at Microsoft.   I suggested he also consider Chromium, he agreed and got his resume in front of the right people the next week.  On the plane I loaned him my magazine and when we got off the plane less than an hour later he had finished it.  Ry reads incredibly fast.  Rather than him catch a taxi to his home in Moscow Barb and I gave him a ride.

Everyone at work was just as impressed by Ry as I was.  During the interview process the test manager came into my office and said that he had stopped the typical interrogation process and was going to have everyone else work on convincing Ry that Chromium was the place to work rather than Microsoft where he had received an offer.  A few days later Ry was working at Chromium just down the hall from me.  I found out that as he drove home from his interview at Chromium he stopped off at Vantage to use his minivan as a dune buggy in the sand dunes to celebrate how well the interview had gone at Chromium.  It was nearly midnight and when he tipped it over he had to walk a mile or so on the interstate to find someone who would give him a tow and get his van upright again.  This was just one of many well thought out adventures that I would hear about and occasionally witness.  Barb quickly concluded that he was incompletely myelinated.  There has been no evidence to contraindicate that diagnosis in the subsequent years (see also this posting).

Ry lived on the couch in the apartment I had in Kirkland most of the time we worked at Chromium and we were both laid off on the same day when Eric ran out of money.  I couldn’t tell you the number of times we have talked late into the night until the sun came up.  Such far ranging topics and ideas for things.  It’s always a thrill to be around Ry.  And he has been a tremendous help in the Boomershoot.  He was always ready to help test a new idea for explosives and had lots of ideas of his own.  And I especially loved it when one of us would come up with an idea and the other would immediately modify it to make it something that would actually work.  I would tell him that between the two of us we had a complete brain.

I so glad that he finally got a decent paying job after being laid off at Chromium, but he has moved 300 miles away.

heavy sigh

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One thought on “Ry is gone

  1. Now I really wish I would have got to know him… swear I saw him walking around WSU one day.

    Hard to place names with faces you’ve seen off the internet… They aren’t always wearing cool hats and reading Gun Magazines.

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