My Friend Brian

My best friend passed away in 2012.  It was sudden since he was only 44 years old.  I remember having a conversation with him on the couch one Sunday while watching the Steelers play.  We were 35 at the time.  We talked about how the life expectancy of people in America is roughly 70 years and that we were about half done.  What did we want to do with the next 35 years.  None of us know when our time is up and I wish we would have done more things together.

I'm not regretting how the next 9 years played out because he and I had such a wonderful friendship and I am realizing now how much he meant to me.  I think about him daily it seems.  He would say that's a little weird and let go of my ears!  He and I talked seriously for bits and pieces, but never stayed serious for long.

For his funeral service, his mom and step dad asked some of us to talk.  It was supposed to be a party but there were many tears shed that day by everyone around.  I tried to keep my talk light in spite of how I really felt and wanted to finally share my notes with the internets.  Here they are:

I remember the day I met Brian.  Harpos. 3 fluids of life: milk, water and beer.  We were enjoying one of them at the time.  I think I’ll go to Harpos after the service.

First meatcake.  It was SuperBowl Sunday when the Seahawks were playing the Steelers and it was his birthday. He couldn’t eat sweets anymore so cake was off the menu.  So we made him meatcake.  Using wax candles on the cake was a lesson in chemistry/physics.

Isaac’s first haircut.  We celebrated touchdowns with tequila shots and during halftime of one of the games we decided to cut Isaac’s hair.  I still have that hair.

He was uncle Brian to my kids and kept a picture of them on his desk that he could focus on when – in his words: he wanted to kill someone.

There were a lot of firsts with my friend Brian and I miss him.

Actual Hours

In my world, we do lots of estimating and I wonder why when I see a header in a spreadsheet that says "actual hours" for a card/task/project my feathers are ruffled. 

I think it's because my first love is mathematics and in that world, there is no guessing.  It either is or isn't.  Coming from that world and seeing actual hours leads me to think of the impossiblity of the accuracy of that data. 

No one is using a timer to get the task done and even if they are, they are seldom working just on that one thing the entire time.  Think about having to use the restroom during said exercise; you'd now be required to track the time of two things: your project and your time away using the restroom.  We're not timing the projects/tasks very well - if at all - to begin with, so what makes us think we can time two things or one thing with an interrupt any better?

Keeping track of actual hours just seems to be an exercise in futility or a grand waste of time.