Fighting the good fight

I just want to give a shout out to my old dot-com work friend Dan, who, I found out last night, was just diagnosed with cancer. He's going to spend the holidays undergoing chemo and radiation. He's a trooper and a jokester like me, so I know he has the spirit to fight.

Thanks to caller ID, whenever Dan would call me, I would answer the phone, "This is Bob." The first time I did that, without missing a beat, Dan said "Bob? Bill here." Then it got shortened to "Bob? Bill." And then we'd launch into whatever work crap we had to discuss. Sometimes no first names were used, and we just referred to each other as Dork. We went through some interesting work times together. At one point, we were in the conference room with Rob, shaking our heads and marveling because we just found out our funding got pulled, all the employees in the office weren't going to get paid, we had one employee coming in at 5 a.m. to surf the Web for porn, and there was an undercover cop outside our office waiting to arrest another employee for welfare fraud. What else can you do in a moment like that then laugh. And we did. If we can overcome those obstacles with a smile, then I know he can head into this tough time with one, too.

Dan, our thoughts are with you.