Pocket Computer revisited

I'd come back from the UK at the end of 1992 with my younger brother's programmable calculator, a Casio. It was an impressive thing and in my opinion, bringing it to Canada to be a useful device in my career, served to keep his memory fresh in my mind.

However, there was another device out there that caught my eye, and I knew that it had the capability to run Lotus 123, and be a "pocket" clamshell computer. It was a Hewlett Packard HP100LX :

It was a full on DOS computer that was over a thousand bucks, and I set up a nefarious deal with a chap that had advertised in the paper, he had a brand new unit for a mere five hundred bucks.

I called his number (not internet back then) and he said "I bought it for my girlfriend and she does not want it" which I completely believed. He said the best thing would be to meet at night time in the carpark at the McDonalds on Markham Road near Toronto, make sure to bring cash in unmarked bills and he said that we'd be good to go.

And so it was.

Ok, he did not say bring unmarked bills, but the entire transaction felt like some sort of drug deal and at one point I felt that I would be killed during the proceedings. However, in the end I was safe and I did not care, I had secured a brand new HP 100LX and I was happy as a clam with a clamshell.

It was time to put the "Houseplan" home budget spreadsheet on a pocket computer.

Danger Zone

The work on the F/A-18 E/F continued and I was initially responsible for several items in the catapult launch train. In the early stages we were shown a training video, with the previous derivative of the Hornet undertaking launch and arrest. It was exciting stuff.

What was more exciting was my "bad monkey" status seemed to be wearing off and I was being sent out on trips to further the project. It was during one of these trips that I met up again with Ray Rapo and the guys from Cleveland Pneumatic, saw my first Hummer vehicle at the South Bend airport and enjoyed many Dos Equis beers at the American bars once more.

A lot of the work was intense with quite steep learning curves, we were expected to "port" the McDonnell Douglas fatigue program over to the computer system and the processing requirements of their "flight by flight" spectrum required Dowty to invest in a much improved mainframe and hundreds of hours of coding and debugging by the guys.

It was during this time my professional friendship with a McDonnell Douglas structural guy, Ed Nowakowski, started. That relationship, and the overall F/A-18 program rekindled my respect for the American "no BS" type approach, which of course meant that I had to get my personal act together and rein in my bouts of silliness and immaturity.

Another steep learning curve.

Eye Contact

The first days back at Dowty were difficult, mainly because of the inability of most of my colleagues to make eye contact, or act remotely normal around me. I know I was walking my own little tightrope between the hours, managing to hold off the tears while somehow attempting to focus on the mundane.

John Jeffries came to talk to me, and I don't know why, or ever asked for that matter, but I could just see in his eyes that he understood my pain. I had held my composure quite well until he came to chat that Monday or Tuesday, however, once I looked into his eyes I lost it completely.

It was a good thing.

It seemed from that moment on things started to be better, perhaps only in tiny steps, but my life started to work it's way back to the "new" normal and I was able to focus on work once more.

In the month that followed, things settled down at work, and at home. 

Those that have lost a brother, sister or parent for that matter, may know of a strange positive consequence of the loss, and the equally strange feeling of guilt associated with that effect.

I found myself enjoying life more and realised certain things that had been taken for granted were important again. This was a broad, sweeping appreciation of most of life's pleasures, food, drink, sex, driving with the window down, almost anything to do with life became focused, as though it was all new and special again.

I realised that all of this was down to the fact that my brother had been killed, that I was somehow benefiting from the loss, which mixed this new found lust for life with a growing feeling of guilt and almost an inability to look myself in the eyes in a mirror.

It was another stage of grief.

I concluded that to honour my brother and to make some good consequence out of his tragic death, I should attempt to live my life to the fullest. I knew that I could not blame myself, however indirectly, for his death and that each new day of my continuing life, was an extension of his.

It was time to move on.

I did not realise at the time....

It seems that a lot of my time is spent here in the present, reflecting about the past and wondering what would have been different if I had done something in a different way and how things may have turned out or how people would have been affected.

I've called the process "unproductive nostalgia" and that's mostly what it is, and perhaps in ten years time I will look back at this blog and think along similar lines, that perhaps my time spent doing this could have been used in a more productive manner.

That being said, I regret not writing down what was happening in 1992 and '93 and I did not realise at the time how important it all was.

I had flown back from the UK, following the funeral of my young brother. It had been an odd flight, because I was using his ticket, and ironically it was the exact flight that would have been the start of his two week holiday in Canada, a period of time for the pair of us to find out about each other.

We had talked on the phone a few weeks before and Paul had mentioned that he would borrow my Ford Mustang to do some exploring while he was here, I'd talked to mum afterwards and she had told me in no uncertain terms not to let him drive while in Canada.

That was fine, as I never intended for him to get behind the wheel on the wrong side of the road, especially in my beloved Mustang.

The details of the events of the night of his death were vague, but it had been rumoured that Paul and his girlfriend, Barbara, had been arguing on the Saturday night, that they were separated and yards away from each other when he was clipped by the car.

During the flight, I wondered if it was all because I lived in Canada that he had been killed.

That sounds insane I know, but it was my thought process, that the butterfly effect of my actions five years prior, when I emigrated to Canada, had led to Paul planning his visit and subesequently resulted in tension and an argument about the holiday on the Saturday a week before his flight.

That it was somehow my fault.

It was a secret I kept from the nice lady who sat next to me on the plane, during the flight we had chatted about this and that, but not really about that. I had told her that I had been visiting my family in the UK, and all was well.

I wonder what Paul would have said to her as they approached Toronto.