Wednesday, July 11, 2001

A guy I used to work with died last week and it’s still on my mind. I hesitate calling him friend because I completely lost touch when I left the company. He was just one of those genuinely nice people that you are sometimes lucky enough to run into. We always joked around and he was a great help when I was learning the brick business. The company that I worked for had purchased his families business so even though Doug was a young guy he had been around bricks his entire life. I learned more from walking around in the stacks with Doug, than I learned at any of the training seminars that I attended. Ironically it was those very stacks that ended his life. They were moving locations and they were down to the inventory that had been around forever. Bricks are held together with steel bands that unfortunately aren’t immune to the affects of time and weather. Apparently as Doug was walking back to the forklift a band snapped on one of the lower cubes and a complete stack fell on top of him. By the time his coworkers got to him it was over. 2 tons of bricks ended a life that I’m not sure should have been over. I’m sure his wife and two small babies would agree. I can’t decide if the whole death by bricks thing is ironic, or just a bummer. 12:00:00 AM    says you