Judy Hunter, an old co-worker of mine, retired from work a couple of months ago. Her name came up in conversation today and it made me think of a few times she and I spent together.

When I first started on the Hotline back in the spring of 1995, it was Judy’s job to teach me Novell, even though one of my best friends (Jeff) also worked on the Hotline, and had actually referred me — I guess they didn’t want Jeff and I dicking around together all day. Judy taught me how to map drives and mount partitions in Novell, something that, as a guy with a strong DOS/Windows background, I had no experience with.

In the fall of 1995 and spring of 1996, the Hotline got tasked with performing “tech refreshes”. A “minimum standard baseline” was determine for all client machines. To date myself, the standard was that each machine would have a 386 processor, 8 megs of RAM, and a 540 meg hard drive. This was long before the days of SMS or any sort of network-based inventory system. Instead, we e-mailed out Excel spreadsheets to each of our 130 remote offices. The computer specialists in those offices would fill out the spreadsheets letting us know how many hard drives and sticks of RAM they needed, and then what we called “care packages” full of those parts would be assembled. The packages were sent out, and teams of two Hotline members were sent out to each site to perform the physical computer upgrades.

My teammate was Judy, and the two of us must’ve been pretty low on the Hotline totem pole. While other teams went to places like Hawaii and Florida and California, Judy and I got sent to Phoenix in the dead of summer, and spent two weeks together in Minnesota in the middle of winter. In fact, our first trip together was in August of 1995, when we spent a week in Atlanta, Georgia.

Being 22-years-old and cocky, I scoffed one night in Atlanta when Judy and Deborah (the local computer specialist) decided to take me out drinking. “I’m going to show these two broads what drinking’s all about,” I said to myself. Instead, Deborah kicked off the evening by taking us to Hooters for dinner and buying us each our own pitcher of beer. From there we went to a wine tasting stand, and later had frozen alcoholic drinks before ending up back at the hotel, doing Tequila shots at the bar. Judy and Deborah — or somebody — had to help me up to my room. I was a wreck the following morning and must’ve looked worse than I felt. Judy, on the other hand, was up and ready to go. That was the last time I ever decided to show broads what drinking’s all about. Especially those two broads. :)

At 22, things like hotels and rental cars were still exciting to me. I didn’t have a big sense of adventure when it came to seeking out restaurants back then. Judy would toss me the keys to the rental car and let me drive every time. Long before GPS units were commonplace, Judy always said I had a knack for being able to find the closest Taco Bell in any city. And I could, too. I’d just get in the car and instinctively drive right to one. Judy would usually bring along some fruit or something and I’d load up on soft chicken tacos and that’s how we would spend our evenings on the road together. Along with Atlanta and Minnesota and Phoenix, I know the two of us also went to Spokane and St. Louis and a few other places together.

We used to have two offices in Minnesota, and someone suggested that if he did both of those offices back to back, we could save some travel expenses. So Judy and I went to Minnesota, in January. We stayed in a Day’s Inn, next to a TGI Fridays and across the street from the Mall of America. Another friend of ours, Paula, went on the trip too, and the three of us spent a lot of time over at the Mall of America. Since we were doing two offices back-to-back we ended up working over the weekend, and one of the managers told us we didn’t need a physical key because there was a keypad on the side of the building. When we got to the office Saturday morning, it was sleeting so hard that the keypad had an inch or two of ice built up on the keypad. Our rental car had a can of spray deicer, but it was empty. Eventually we just hammered the ice off with the can. During that same trip, I think the two of us went Thrift Store shopping to kill some time and I found these maroon corduroy pants that fit in the waist but were at least a foot too long. I had this pair of combat boots I was wearing at the time so I just shoved the end of those pant legs down inside those boots and wore those pants back on the plane. I’m pretty sure Susan threw them out the first time I wasn’t looking.

On another trip, this time in Spokane, the two of us along with two other co-workers all went out to dinner. I didn’t have my work credit card with me for some reason, so instead we had to stop by an ATM so I could withdraw some cash. After inserting my card we learned that the machine was stuck speaking Spanish. We managed to get through the menus, but the whole time the machine was loudly speaking in Espanol and we were laughing our heads off. That story is probably funnier if you’ve had a few drinks, which I’m sure we already had by that point in the evening.

Judy was a pretty private person. I remember one time at work she asked if someone could change her last name for her in our e-mail system. When someone asked why, she said it was because she had got married a few months earlier. Her husband Rick used to work out at the FAA for a while, too. Rick was a nice guy and always wore a cool Indiana Jones-style fedora. I think Judy had three sons. For a while one of her sons was giving her grief, but I remember he really put his life together and she was really proud of him. Her youngest son was just a toddler back when Judy and I started traveling together. Then I remember the day she said that same son was going off to college. I can’t believe how long many of us worked together out there.

As the years went on many of us advanced into different positions. I moved into a networking position; Judy did too, for a while, and then became a SQL database administrator. I don’t want to say some of our internal apps were designed poorly, so let’s just say some of them needed a lot of hands-on caressing to work on a daily basis. Judy did a lot of that work behind the scenes. I always kind of thought of her job as like someone who worked inside Big Ben, making sure the clock was working and the time was right. The only time anyone noticed Judy worked there was when something broke. I think being a SQL DBA can be a pretty thankless job at times.

For the past seven or eight years, Judy sat tucked away at the end of a row on the 3rd floor of the same building in which I work in the basement. Unless one of us had a reason to visit the other, which was almost never, we rarely ran into one another except if we happened to be walking through the parking lot at the same time. I know Judy had either back or neck surgery a few years ago and hasn’t been feeling great, but you would never know it from talking to her. Judy always had a smile on her face and would always stop and give me a hug in the hallway, every time I saw her.

Judy’s the time of person who did computers from 8-5 and then walked away from them. She’s not on Facebook and I’d bet you she hasn’t touched a computer since she left the FAA. Good for her. :)

Miss ya, Jude.