Rick Sanderson

This is a placeholder for stories about my late friend Rick. 

I first met Rick when I was hired by CalDy Systems, where he worked as a salesman. Rick was exceptionally bright and had a genuine talent for connecting with people. He was a formidable salesman and, to a considerable extent, he kept the company afloat.

As it happened, shortly after I arrived, the company that made the computers we sold — and on which our software ran — went out of business. We suddenly had to find a way to port the software to another computer. I managed to do that in fairly short order. In different ways, Rick and I both became pretty critical to that company.

I had plenty of friends, and I am "neurodivergent" enough that I don't even keep up properly with the friends and family I already have. But Rick worked his magic on me and, over time, we became friends. He was enjoyable and painless to be around.

I'm fine when I'm "on", so people who don't know me particularly well often think of me as gregarious and friendly. When I'm out and about and switched on, I am. But people who know me well also see me when I am not "on". Then I am quite private, prefer my own company, and can be downright unfriendly if interrupted.

Because we worked together, Rick saw me as I actually was. Somehow, though, he remained painless. He had a knack for knowing what to say and, unlike me, an equally useful knack for knowing when not to say anything.

Both Rick and I were unusual. I never gave that much thought because I have always been surrounded by unusual people. At the time, I just thought we were normal.

I was only at CalDy for a little over a year. The company relocated to Florida, and neither Rick nor I ended up going with them. I moved on to another company, then contracted to IBM, and eventually spent five years as a manager at a bank.

During that time, Rick taught himself to program, hired another programmer named Manish, and built a competing system to the CalDy software. We stayed in touch over the years, and when I went out on my own as a contractor in 1992, we worked together briefly.

Rick's software was intended to handle tour-wholesaling inventory, which turns out to be a surprisingly difficult problem. He worked through several programming languages and paradigms trying to solve it. In the process, he became an accomplished programmer, largely by educating himself while trying to build a system competitive enough to sell.

Both Rick and I were obsessive workers, so we did not see each other as much as we should have. Still, when we did get together, we had memorable times. Every so often we would go out for dinner, put away several bottles of wine over the course of an evening, and spend hours laughing.

I have worked in more than three dozen places over the years, and the travel industry was the most vexatious of them all. The fact that Rick managed to make a business work in that industry is genuinely impressive. Had he chosen almost any easier industry, I suspect he would have become a very wealthy man fairly early.

It is a long time ago now, but for a while Rick and I were both single and we spent quite a bit of time together. Rick was always learning something. At one point he learned to fly and had some sort of aircraft-sharing arrangement with a fellow named Tony.

The three of us were at a party one night and ended up off in a separate room talking. What we had in common was the travel industry, and Rick and I got going back and forth about some of the horrible experiences we had endured in it. We had Tony laughing so hard that eventually I had to leave the room just to give him a chance to breathe.

Rick was contagious fun. He made me funnier just by being there.

At another point, Rick became interested in photography and had a darkroom in his apartment where he developed black-and-white film. My favourite photograph of myself was taken by Rick during a quiet moment in his apartment.

In the end, most of what really matters in life comes down to friends, family, and community. For me, Rick was all three.

His death was singularly sad for me because I had not seen him for years, although getting down to see him was perpetually on my "to-do" list. Ironically, I had reached out about a year before he died. He was busy working on code and, because I know what it is like to be deep in the pit and "in the zone", I decided to give him the time and space to finish what he was doing.

Unlike me, Rick would give you his full attention when you were with him. I could tell that, at that moment, he felt his attention needed to be elsewhere, so I let him be.

I still have mixed feelings about that decision.

On one hand, when you are intensely involved in interesting and important work, that may be exactly how you want to spend your time. If a person turns out not to have much time left, there is even an argument that they should be left alone to spend it doing something they love.

On the other hand, a part of me wonders whether, if I had broken his concentration and gone to see him, we might have noticed that he needed medical attention. I had suffered a heart attack years earlier. Perhaps I would have recognized something.

I don't know.

What I do know is that I wish I had seen him.