Tip of the Iceberg

Category family birthday
Ever since Lotusphere '08, some of my friends and colleagues have taken to calling me "Trip", and I noticed lately that I'm signing more and more of my emails as such. While I'm flattered to even have a nickname, the sensation this one evokes is slightly odd: as many of you know, in my first Notes job (technically, my first three, if you count role and organizational changes... it's a large company, so if you're a developer, for example, your department is completely distinct from the tier two administrators), one of my coworkers and earliest mentors was my father (known primarily on this site as "Pops"), and nearly everybody there called him "Trip".

Funny story: a few weeks in, I needed to ask him something, and prefaced my question with, "Hey, Dad," just as our boss was walking by. "Tim," the boss said, "in the office, he's Denny." I was too new to know how dry his sense of humor was, so I didn't realize he was just joking with me, and for nearly a year I used my father's first name (whether speaking to or about him). Finally one day in a meeting, I was relating the status of some joint project that "Denny and I" had been working on, and my boss interrupted: "Will you cut that out? It's creepy." But it was too late; the habit had already become ingrained. Initially because I thought I had to, but increasingly as time passed because of our work dynamic, I had come to view him not just as my father and my friend, but also as a respected colleague. I'm one of those lucky kids who grew up to find that their parents have truly become close friends as much as family. But I'm doubly lucky in that, for a few years, my Dad and I were also fellow Yellowbleeders. Though he's since moved on to a different field, he was one of the best Domino admins I've ever worked with, and it's still fun to geek out with him about all things Lotus. So... I guess now he's "Big Trip" and I'm "Little Trip".

Today's his birthday. I won't embarrass him by revealing his age (he's way older than he looks... or acts, for that matter), but here's to the guy who first introduced me to this wacky "Notes" thing, all those years ago. Happy birthday, Trip.