in the midst

I like Prague a lot. For once I even took notes, so there will be a reasonably informative entry about it soon, on the other site. Hopefully the words will balance out the mediocre photos – we took scads, but we never seemed to have the camera and the good light all at the same time (a problem with being fairly far north in summer) and so none of the photos are particularly mindblowing.

We took this morning off, too, to do Important Things: I had an official stamped copy of my driver’s license, a package picked up from the post office, and immunizations in both arms, all before 11AM.

Rudder spent most of the morning on the phone; he hadn’t taken it along on the trip, so it was an even worse surprise to turn it on this morning, check messages, and learn that one of his direct reports died over the weekend.

It gets worse; the employee is from Taiwan, was over here for three months of training, and was due to go back home in a week. He has a wife and two young children. The only thing that might ease the pain a tiny bit for his family is that he dropped dead while jogging; it wasn’t an accident or anything that was a result of being here, just something that would have happened wherever he was.

I keep picturing his wife, after doing the single-mom thing for three months, just beginning to tell her children the Daddy’s coming home soon. Maybe she had a calendar for them to check off; I would have, in her place. Now she has to tell them that Daddy’s not coming home, ever.
(I didn’t know the guy and Rudder didn’t know him well; for all I know his family were glad about it. But I don’t think so, judging by how promptly they all decided to fly over here, and he obviously came across as a decent person in a job interview at least. Anyway, that’s an even sadden vision than the other.)

So Rudder’s been spending his day working on plans and arrangements, and may have to fly over to Taiwan sooner than he’d expected. I’ve worked in offices before where they had to tell us that someone well-liked had suddenly dropped dead, or in one case where they got an apartment superintendent to break into an employee”s place after he’d missed work for a few days (that one was memorable because, though I hadn’t known it, he lived just a few doors down from me). It doesn’t get any less awful when it’s happened before though. Especially when I think about the poor guy’s family.