my colleague, steve: rip

Yesterday I found out that a colleague, Steve, had passed away the day before.

Steve was older than me by a few years -- exactly how many, I don't know. Some characterized his age as "60-ish," but I think he was younger than that. Either way, it's too young to die. I didn't know he was sick, though apparently he had been out on short-term disability for some time. Of course, in an environment where many people work from home half the time (or more), it's easy to not notice someone missing -- especially if your work and his rarely connect.

Occasionally at work there'll be spome function where people have to say how long they've been at the company. Sometimes, when someone reveals a tenure that would be considered long in most contexts (e.g., 20 years), I may smirk and say something like "newbie" in a faux-mocking tone. Steve was one of the ones who could call me a newbie.

In my first rotation as a fresh-faced actuarial student, I was in the unit that administered actuarial functions related to our defined benefit business. One task that I had to perform on occasion involved researching participants' transaction histories. These histories determined what benefits they were entitled to. This many years later, I don't remember the details, so I can't explain it better than that. At any rate, I had to go to microfiche files, look up their transactions, copy them down and then perform some calculations in order to determine what category they belonged to. It was a very tedious process and I hated it. Steve usually had the task of checking my work.

On one occasion I took a shortcut. After getting part of a person's history I was able to determine what category he would be in. I could prove mathematically that he couldn't possibly be in any of the other categories. So I stopped searching through the records, wrote up my results and handed it to Steve. He asked about the rest of the transactions. I pointed out that they didn't matter -- no matter what else I would find, the category wouldn't change. He was clearly amused, but he explained to me that the work could get audited, and the auditors would want a complete transactional history. A proof based on a partial history wouldn't cut it even if it was right. That was when I realized that I had left the world of mathematicians.

I never forgot that lesson that Steve taught me, and the patient way he taught it to me.

Rest easy, Steve.