Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

He was the best of us.

That is not hyperbole.

That is not with exception.

Well, admittedly I don’t know everyone on the planet, but of the people I think I know well enough to say, Joe Rogers was the best of us. And not just by a single measurement.

The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long …

Tyrell, “Blade Runner”

If that’s at all true, I’m set for 90. Probably safe well into my 130s.

I met Joe probably sometime in late 1990s or early 2000s. I didn’t know it at the time (and still have trouble dealing with it) but he was four years my junior. It didn’t take long before I realized that Joe was doing what I wanted to do, so any opportunity I had to spend time with him, including taking an informal Introduction To Networking course that he held for his students (I was a staff member doing web/desktop support for the Library, where Joe’s office was).

Joe was, in many areas, the smartest person I knew. And I know some pretty damn smart people. As a technologist, I know of no other individual that understood so well the entire breadth of how it all worked, and could jump from section to section to section of a technology issue and just know what the problem was. Joe could context switch better than anyone – walk in to his office while he was arms deep in some issue, ask him a question, and he’d answer you without even thinking … and then go right back to where he was.

I’ve been told that I’m not alone when I say that in the same situation, it would take me significant time to get back to where I was.

Joe’s technical knowledge was legendary to all who knew him … even in passing. During his memorial (which was standing room only, with attendees present in the lobby of the funeral home), many stories were told. One attendee, a former student assistant I think, was working on an issue with a tunnel between a Cisco device and another manufacturer’s endpoint. He had spent hours with the Cisco TAC representative trying everything he could to get the tunnel up and running, when the Cisco TAC rep finally said, “Well, I’m almost out of ideas, but there’s this guy who’s also in Tampa that I know that I’ll give a call and see what he thinks.” Our storyteller responded:

“Is his name Joe Rogers?”

TAC: “Yeah! You know him?”

“Yeah I have his cell number. I’ll just call him direct.”

And wouldn’t you know it, Joe picked up the phone, and within a fairly short period of time had explained the issues and walked our storyteller through getting the tunnel up. And, oh yeah … Joe was driving down the road at the time.

Most people I know would have been too distracted to be able to answer a potentially difficult question while driving. For Joe, rarely was there a difficult question.

Another attendee told stories about Joe as the staff advisor to the USF Whitehatters Security club, whose meetings Joe attended more than he did … and the attendee was the club president at the time. He approached Joe with the idea of competing at DEFCON, and Joe didn’t skip a beat: Sure, we could do that. And they would go on to not only win DEFCON, competing against Nation-state level teams, but eventually go on to run the DEFCON competitions for several years. And lines would form in front of Joe’s spot of attendees and competitors so often that a year or two in they had to arrange handlers for Joe.

I was not ready to speak in front of everyone at the memorial.  I think I probably would have babbled for to long, broke down crying, and just repeated what had already been said.  But the memorial did offer me the opportunity to meet Joe’s parents, and individually tell them, “You did a good job.”

My most memorable story isn’t a technological one, but a “I had no idea Joe did that” one. I had left the University for 11 months, after having left under what I personally felt was poor circumstances (when you take a Network/Server Support Specialist and take away his network and his servers … and leave him with just doing Desktop Support duties, he’s not going to be happy), the only way you could have gotten me back to USF was for the opportunity to work with Joe. So I stopped by the office the during the process of becoming re-employed and said:

Me: Hey guys just here doing paperwork. Is Joe around?

Lou: No, he’s out hunting.

Me: …

Me: …

Me: You mean like with a gun and an orange vest?

Lou: Exactly.

It was at that point that nothing would have surprised me about Joe. Seeing pictures of him fishing? Nah, that’s Joe. That he did rocketry when he was a kid? Of course he did. Mountain biking? Without question … though the idea of him injuring himself always gave us some concern.

Being one of the people that worked for Joe, I always felt that if I could in any way reduce the amount of crap he had to deal with, I was doing proper work. But, alas, as one of the people that Joe had to supervise, every evaluation would start with “I’m sorry I’m an idiot.”

But Joe would always respond: “No you actually did pretty good.”

See, knowing Joe the way someone who spent a fair amount of time in his presence in a work environment would, was both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing was that you were given a hint as to what a human being might be capable of. As quiet and unassuming, as downright humble, as patient, and as kind as Joe could be, it made you think, “Yeah, I could do that.”

The curse was that after a period of time it sunk in that Joe was just so damn exceptional. Indeed, having him as a safety net for as long as I did … I wouldn’t change a thing (unless I could make him live longer), but I can’t help but feel that, even with him going out of his way to make every moment a teaching moment, perhaps being in his presence hamstrung me. I don’t know, really. I’m naturally lazy and maybe the desire to not disappoint Joe any more than I already had was a form of motivation, but there’s also the “If I get stuck Joe will rescue me” that was always in the back of my head, so I have to wonder that maybe … just maybe … I didn’t apply myself as much as I could have.

I’m petrified that that safety net is gone.

I’ve seen Joe get angry. But he had the patience and kindness of a saint. The few times he’s actually been angry in my presence it was about something that would have positively enraged lesser men.

And we were all lesser men.

Joe bravely fought cancer and it was just such a foreign concept that someone so important in so many ways to so many people would succumb to it that it was hard to understand when we were told that the doctors had finally given up; that Joe was going into hospice care at home. It made Cisco Live 2019 one of the hardest ones to handle, which is one reason why I haven’t (and probably won’t) done a blog post about it. Finding out midway through that he had passed, I could only come up with one thing to post to Facebook:

The ways in which the world is diminished are incalculable.

Writing for me is sometimes a cathartic process. That doesn’t mean it’s an easy one. I was hoping I could get away with just moving on, but in this case, much like as it was with Papi, I had the words swirling through my head, and I knew that it would eventually need to be written. When I decided that, kind of as an homage to Joe, that there were people (students and non-networking team members) that could benefit from an intro to networking course, and I could teach it, but that it was going to require at least one blog post … I couldn’t put off writing this any longer. So … here it is, subject, as usual, to heavy editing later.