"So, is cutter not here today?"

It took me a second to figure out who Don was referring to with the term cutter but after a moment I figured out that he meant Jon. Jon is a guy that I, until recently, worked with. We called him No H on the account of the fact that my name is John. Over the course of a year and a half to two years No H proved to be a great co-worker. Even more than that, he proved to be one of the strangest people I have met to date. As I don't usually cover the things that make people great, I'm going to focus on the weird.

The Enormously Weird House

One of the first customers that No H and I worked together on had offices on the 25th floor of a building in downtown Fort Worth. That day, No H decided on what his dream house was. It started out simple, but then evolved and evolved until wat have what I will describe here:

It's a 25 story tall house, but floors 1-24 do not have anything on them. The whole house is on the 25th floor. The walls of the house are made from the styrofoam shipping material that monitors and computers ship in as well as plastic sheets. In order to make it to the house, you have to go through the following. First you take an elevator up a few floors, then you have to climb a flight of stairs. After the stairs, you have to climb a ladder a few stories. Then climb a rope (like in gym class), ride an escalator and you should be at the house.


Fire Not Fire

At the same customer, our next instance occurred. We were sitting in a server room and talking about the fact that there had been a fire in there a few weeks before. No H started asking questions about how smoke detectors and sprinkler systems worked. We got on the subject about how heat always rises (he didn't believe me) and how that meant that the heat from a fire would also rise (still didn't believe me). He decided that he would go on a quest to start looking for fire whose heat does not rise. He never really did anything on this quest, but he sword that he would find this fire. Every so often he would bring this up in conversation and re-swear that he would find it.


The Master of Hugs

It was a pretty wide spread rumor that No H was gay. He had a girlfriend, but the main reason that everyone spread this around was that he always offered his co-workers hugs. Keep in mind that we have a fairly male dominated office, so 90% of the times he was offering hugs to other men. We work a lot on Cisco gear and they are really big on their certification program, so we invented a certification for him, the CCHM or Cisco Certified Hug Master. He really wasn't gay, but it was fun to tell him that he was for wanting to hug all of us.


Cutter

No H and I worked a lot at another customer for a good long while. Near the end of the project, we all went out to eat together. Everyone is sitting there talking after eating about various things, work, non-work, whatever. I look over at a pause in the conversation and see No H taking his butter knife from dinner and attempting to cut through the napkin that he has on the table in front of him. He's completely oblivious to everyone there and continues cutting on the napkin until he cuts through it, then he starts cutting through another part of it. I really hoped that he would be unnoticed, but those hopes were dashed a week later when I came into the customer site and was asked, "Where's cutter today?" Of course the jokes abounded like hiding sharp objects from him and so forth, though I don't think he actually made it back on site to be ridiculed by the customer.

There are plenty of other stories that I could tell about No H, but as it's taken me several months to write this much, I thought I would go ahead and put up what I have. Maybe I will write more stories later about No H.