Category: Work Page 1 of 9

I made passing acquaintance one day with a guy named Frank Evans in 1983 at Intelledex, an early machine vision and robotics company in Corvallis, Oregon. He was one of the principal engineers while I was a lowly technical writer and industrial trainer. We have both worked in this field ever since. We have not really worked at the same company together for over twenty years, but we have stayed in touch and I have used him as a contractor in three different companies over long periods of time.

In our current stint, we are coming up on seven years together. He is getting to the end now and continues to work with me, not because he needs the money, but because the work is interesting and the people are of good will. I am getting to that point myself. It has been a good reminder that I have many things for which to be thankful. Sometimes, I do not put my work in that list, but I have to say it has been a gift to be able to do work that I love with people of good will. I honestly believe that comes from God.

Back in the late 1990’s I worked for a company named ESI on a new product. There were problems with the product and I worked many hours, often through the night to resolve them. I was in a small group and was the only one who could do the work. I am not sure my boss even knew I was doing that. But my friend Frank, who worked in a completely different department on the other side of a very big building saw. I was getting pretty down about it and was not sure I would ever resolve the problem¹. Right in the middle of all that, Frank showed up with a bottle of Duck Pond Pinot Noir wine from Dundee, Oregon, just up the road from where we lived, gave it to me and said my efforts were not going unnoticed. I appreciated that beyond words. I am not sure what year was the vintage, it might have been 1995, but it was amazing. I liked it so much that I asked him about it later. He told me that Duck Pond had always made a great bottle of Pinot Noir being located in the red hills of Dundee, but for some reason, that one year was just off the charts better than anything they had done before and it had not yet been discovered by the wine snobs. That weekend, I went out and bought a case of it. It took us several years to finish the whole case and every bottle was as amazing as the one Frank gave me. Lorena and I found a bottle of the 2021 vintage so we could share it with the family. We have no idea whether it is as good as the first bottle, but the memories were worth the price of purchae.

1. With a little help from Frank and Mark, I eventually worked it out. ↩︎