Current mood:	sad
Current music:	A New Found Glory - Truth of My Youth

For Jim
 Last Monday night one of my mentors from Boeing Rotorcraft in Philadelphia, Jim Gibbons, passed away after battling an apparent brain aneurysm for a month.  Thanks to former colleagues still in Philly, I'd known he'd been sick.  He'd been getting better, but about 2 weeks ago he had relapsed and I had a foreboding feeling that things weren't good.  Jim left behind a wife and 3 teenaged sons.

Jim was one of the first people I met a Boeing as an intern (actually, i think he was the person who picked me up from HR the first day, since i had absolutely no idea where i was going).  

Funny story - every intern had a "mentor" assigned.  I sat in the 3-10 building with the Comanche guys, and was technically assigned to them.  For the first 2-3 weeks though, I was out and about on various projects (mostly Chinook-related) with Shaw, who is Philly's accident investigator.  So I pretty much considered Shaw my mentor.  After that I settled down and almost exclusively worked on Comanche stuff (aside from about a week or 2 long span where i supported Triple Lab testing for V-22 [plotting and printing stripcharts - mindnumbing doesn't begin to discover it.])  Every week there would be a different lunch & learn/tour for the interns (and their mentors) in various departments of the site.  And every week Jim would show up as my mentor - I was always mentally like "who is this guy?  i never see him during the week and i'm not even sure i remember his name!"

When I came back to Boeing after graduation (as an intern at first), I was assigned to V-22 at first (and picked V-22 when I went full-time a few months later).  I had a desk in our bullpen area, with Jim on my left and Dave Tepper (who passed away from cancer a year or two ago) on my right.  At the time, there was a wholesale reconfiguration of the buildings going on as the whole "focused factory" concept was brought online (this means that to the maximum possible extent, the engineers are located in the factory so support can quickly be provided as needed).  Our little group ended up being moved to 2 offices isolated from everyone else in the main hallways.  4 of us were placed in an old HR suite - 2 in the outer office and Jim and I shared the inner office.  The isolation sucked, but it was so much fun to be 22 yrs old and being able to say "Step into my office" :)  That and we had a HUUUGE whiteboard we could write all over; plus lots of walls we could hang things on.

You get to know someone pretty well when you share an office with them.  Fortunately for me, Jim was a great guy.

It's late here and I'm tired, so more stories of Jim tomorrow or Thurs.