Superstitious? I’m not. At least I thought I wasn’t.

After eight years of military service performing [REDACTED] activities and 30-plus years of martial arts training and teaching, not much scares me, not even public speaking.  I do have to admit, though, that this past Friday the 13th had me spooked.

Friday started out with a bang, literally when we had a huge electrical storm roll through.  Torrential downpours and the crashes of lightning resulted in widespread flooding here in Minnesota, even our parking lot was flooded when we came in for work Friday morning (See our RJS Pool Party pics). 

Then we noticed that the network was running really slowly.  We did some digging and found out that we were running on our backup T1 connection… our primary 50 MB Comcast connection was down.  I did mention lightning above, turns out we took an electrical surge through Comcast again (they got us a couple years ago as well in our old building).  The same thing happened to our neighbors who share the building with us, as they also lost their WAN port on their firewall… completely fried, zero electrical connection.   

This stuff happens when we get crazy electrical storms, it’s not the first time nor will it be the last, I suspect Comcast will blast us again in a couple years, seems to be par for the course with cable service, you’re just a grounding rod for them it seems.

But then the day got tougher… a lot tougher.  We found out shortly after lunch that one of our employees had passed away that morning. 

Many of us only knew Dan Wearda in name as he was permanently assigned to work onsite at one of our customers.  We usually saw him in person only during company outings and occasionally when he came into the office to meet with his manager.  Dan’s cubical is near mine and we’d chat when he was in the office or when I ran into him onsite at his assignment.  Dan was soft-spoken, kind, and very knowledgeable when it came to RPG programming.  He’d call my cell phone often, usually when the VPN was down or when his laptop was flaking out, and he needed help figuring out what it was doing… usually very minor IT related issues, but he was always pleasant to speak with.  We maintain the servers for the customer he’s assigned to, so I would stop by his cube and say hi whenever I was onsite at his location.  I last saw him on Tuesday the 10th when we were adding 4 new drives and a RAID backplane to the IBM iSeries server at our offsite data center.

Rest in peace Dan, you will be missed.  You were an invaluable member of RJS and our hearts go out to your family!

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About Leigh
If RJS employed “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” one could argue our very own Network Security Engineer, Leigh Reimers, just might fit the bill. Leigh is a black-belt karate master and former United States Army tough guy. At RJS, Leigh is a “jack-of-all-trades,” assisting with network administration and support on the off-chance he isn’t solving difficult security conundrums as a certified Sophos Advanced Sales and Technology Engineer.