Something happened on Adrianne's first day of work at BIO-WEST that convinced me we had hired the right person. I was training her on our network and computer systems, and I gave her a challenge. I said if she could set up her own e-mail account, I'd buy her lunch.
I had no expectation of ever buying her lunch. Someone who knows nothing about this e-mail system doesn't have much chance of setting up his or her own account. I thought Adrianne would poke around in the system, learn a few things, and get her account halfway set up. Then, I thought, an hour later, she'd come to me to help her fill in the gaps. That was all anyone could reasonably expect, and if she had accomplished that much, I would have been fairly impressed. She accepted the challenge and I left her on her own.
Right on schedule, an hour later, she came to my desk. However, instead of asking for help, she said, "Okay. All set. You owe me lunch."
I frowned. "Nooo," I said. "Come on. You got it working?" We went to her desk. She had done it. This confused me. There are several settings in our e-mail program that are not only critical for proper function, they are also hard to find and figure out. There was really no way for the uninitiated to correctly configure these obscure settings, not even accidentally. Nevertheless, there was Adrianne's e-mail account, working perfectly. I said, "How did you do it?"
"Oh," she said, "I found these instructions on the network," and she showed me a three-page booklet of BIO-WEST e-mail instructions. It was a document I had written a year previously for our non-technical users, so that they could configure their own e-mail accounts by themselves. I had forgotten about the instructions, but Adrianne had searched around on the BIO-WEST network and found them. They took her step-by-step through the process, including the tricky little settings that were hard to figure out. She won the challenge, and I bought her lunch. Clever girl.
Adrianne and I made lots of lunch bets while she worked at BIO-WEST. She won some and I won some. When she moved back to Murray, I still owed her a lunch, and so when she was in Logan a few Saturdays ago, I paid off that bet. I figured it might be the last time I saw Adrianne for a while.
That first challenge set the tone for Adrianne's time at BIO-WEST. Whatever job we gave her, she would dig into it and find a path to the solution, always with a snarky sort of panache. She instinctively grasped that when it comes to computers, there's never just one fix, and there's no such thing as cheating—if you can make it work well, it's fixed. Her favorite problems were the ones that were supposedly unsolvable. Whenever I gave her one of those tasks, she worked like a beaver, searching online and finding answers and methods and funky little helper programs.
A couple other things: she talked really fast and organized the hell out of everything.
Adrianne and I didn't hang out, per se. We went to lunch during work sometimes, but we didn't pal around. We shared some tastes in music, movies, TV, and books, and we talked about that stuff a lot, but I often taunted her unmercifully about some of the sickly sweet music and mushy chick flicks she liked. I love to argue and debate about movies and music and pop culture, but Adrianne seldom backed down. When she felt strongly about something, she could give it right back to me. It was great when she dug in her heels and we went toe-to-toe like an umpire and a baseball skipper—she was a full foot shorter than me and nearly half my age, but she could defend her position as well as any of my bullheaded, big-mouth buddies. Even though she was a bit of a priss, she had a nice, thick skin and a supple mind.
This is not to say she never got her feelings hurt. She did. We often talked about the troubles she had with boys and friends and dating. I'm not sure I understood her social landscape well enough to be helpful, but sometimes all she really needed was someone to vent to, someone to talk her down, and I was glad to do that.
Then, six or eight months ago, something really bad happened.
I should preface this by saying one thing: I am a jerk. Not all the time, and not for prolonged periods, but I can be a huge jerk. My friends know this, my family knows this, and, unfortunately, Adrianne found out, too. Without going into the sad details, I'll say it had to do with a badly misdirected e-mail and a snide comment. I offended Adrianne very badly, and she was pretty down about it.
Like I said, I'm not always a jerk, and so when the dust settled I wanted to make things right. I went to Adrianne to apologize, but I took along some excuses and justifications, and I planned to put some of the blame back on her. Over the course of a few conversations, I gave Adrianne my apology and the lame excuses. She accepted the apology without any qualifications, and she said she was ready to forget it. She even acknowledged my excuses, but I could tell that she could see right through them. So, I took back the excuses and apologized again, and again she accepted the apology. From that hour forward, the matter was forgiven. She never beat me up about it, never held it against me. She treated me the same as she had before.
Based on what she told me about her friends and the guys she dated, I know that Adrianne treated just about everyone this way—she accepted people whether or not they were sometimes jerks. And even though I'm sure it was a rare thing, she was always able to admit when she was unkind or inconsiderate, too.
When Adrianne left BIO-WEST in January 2009, things were tough. She had taken on a tremendous amount of work and three weeks later we're still trying to take up the slack. Adrianne was very smart, but she still asked me about a of lot things—computers, movies, writing, politics, relationships—and this made me feel very wise and important. I think coming to me for answers was her way of paying me a compliment. She used to say that I taught her everything I knew, and I would kiddingly correct her and say that I taught her everything she knew. I'm very sad to lose my friend, Adrianne McBride, but if I can just remember that time when she forgave me when I gave her every reason to write me off as a callous goon, then I can say that she taught me more than I ever taught her.
-Chadd VanZanten
P.S. -- I'm attaching a photo of Adrianne at BIO-WEST. Please note the Clorox wipes on her desk. Heh.
This is just a 'start' on some of Adrianne's recent music picks... please keep sending in recommendations!