I first met Adrian in high school when I was fourteen.
My school had partnered with Taft High School to be a part of a work program called WIA. WIA was a program for low-income high school students or students with a disability to be placed with one of their partner organizations to work after school for an hour or two (or in some cases, full time in the summers) to gain real-world vacation experience. The thought being that these students probably weren't going to have the opportunity to go to college so the program would give them a leg up to go directly into the workforce after high school. I became a participant in WIA after I had been volunteering for Albert Allen, at which time ran Maricopa's cafeteria and Tea Room during school hours and took care of the campuses computers and network after school, and wanted to find a way to start paying me. So he reached out to Dale Countryman who ran the WIA program. Mr. Countryman was the principal at Maricopa when I began kindergarten so he already was familiar with me.
After a year or so of working with Albert at Maricopa, Mr. Countryman sensed that I could use a new challenge so he set me up with an interview with this guy named Adrian that ran the IT department at Taft College.
I'm going to have to preface how my first interview went with him with what my "professional experience" with Albert had been like up until that point. Albert was what I like to call a "tinkerer". Don't get me wrong, very smart man but he didn't have a background in technology whatsoever. I've come to meet a lot of people like him throughout my life. You know, the people who know just enough to convince people that they're a god-like being versus what they are—a novice, but somehow convinced themselves that they know everything there is to know. "Dazzle them with brilliance or baffle them with bullshit" comes to mind. Sadly, I had developed Albert's mentality for myself.
When it came time for my interview, it was June 2004. I had just had surgery on my left leg a couple of months before and was still in a full leg cast and still needed a walker to get around. I walked into that office with my walker, a brand new, white 50/50 hat turned backward so confident thinking, "these guys will be lucky if I even want to help them out". That was the first time in my life I've ever felt truly humbled.
During that interview, he asked me a series of technical questions to things that I had no clue how to answer. Looking back, they were the most basic questions but they were formed in a way where he didn't want to know if I knew what things did, but why things did what they did. When I left that interview that afternoon, I was slightly embarrassed but more so excited thinking how much I could learn from him.
The first several months I was working there, my only job was "rebuilding" computers. Not physically of course but formatting, putting a fresh copy of the operating system back on, as well as all the software. I was already used to doing this task at my job at Maricopa, the difference being they were so meticulous with their approach. We had a long checklist of every single setting that we would have to check off as we went. And when we were finished, we would have to get a supervisor to come and sign off on it. At Maricopa when we performed this task, there was no structure. We would essentially "wing it" and most of the time get called back out to fix something we forgot to do. This became an invaluable lesson to me years later while I was running my company. Of course, before my tenure as a student worker at the college came to an end, we were researching the best possible way to implement disk imaging which was and still is a faster and more efficient way to accomplish the same thing but I was gone once it did get implemented.
Adrian also taught a night class on computer hardware once a week so we rearranged my work schedule so I could stay after work and attend the class. I was also taking a math course to get ahead on my college credits so each day after work I'd go to the cafeteria, get something to eat and then go to class. The first week I worked for him, he walked me to the cafeteria and told the cafeteria manager that whenever I came in and wanted something to eat or drink, to put it on his personal tab, an offer I'd frequently take him up on whenever I was staying late.
One of my favorite stories of all time still is a situation that occurred during my time at WIA. One of the requirements of the program is we had to attend a class once a month at Taft High School for vocational training (resume building, word processing, Excel, etc). This one afternoon, while attending the class, I finished my assignment early. The guy who taught the class, Ken Anderson was joking with me and made me a bet that I couldn't crack Taft High School's administrator password. I took him up on his bet. And of course, I cracked the password. What Ken didn't anticipate was me going home that evening and emailing Taft High's network administrator, telling them that I cracked their password (and proving it by providing it to them) and stating I work at Taft College and Maricopa School during the week but I'm sure I could find time to go by Taft High and show them how I got in.
When I went to go to work the next day, the top IT people at Taft High were meeting with him and showing him the email I wrote when I got to work. He called me over, introduced me to them and dismissed me to go in the back and start working and he'd come back and talk to me in a minute. I was as nervous as hell. I was pretty sure I was about to get fired. Instead, he simply came back and said, "C.W. don't do that again but if you do, leave my name out of it."
Probably the most influential project I had at Taft College was a software development project I had worked on for several months. To be clear, this was my very first software development project so it was extremely primitive. However, we were looking for a way to prevent college students from running unwanted programs on computer lab computers. So for about four months, half of the time I spent at the college was spent developing a pretty simple program in concept. I didn't know anything about databases at that time so I simply created a text file with a whitelist of allowed processes, read that file into an array, and then every five minutes (because my code was so clunky and probably had memory leaks everywhere, it would max out the CPU and memory whenever it would run), it would look at the current running processes and compare it to those on the whitelist, if it wasn't on the whitelist, it would kill the process.
That program never made it out of the testing phase. But it gave me the bug (pun intended) for software development that I still have today.
When it came time for me to graduate high school, Adrian and about four other members of his staff were there at the ceremony to see me off but little did I know our relationship was in some ways just beginning.
Adrian and I didn't talk much while I was away at college. In fact, the only time that I can remember is early in my third year (around the time I dropped out), I had developed a system for the Housing Department at California State University, Bakersfield (CSUB) for emergency SMS notifications in case of an active shooter or fire or such. This was around the time where campuses were being forced to adopt such systems. I rode the bus over there to meet one day to try and pitch it to him. Looking back, thank god nothing came of it! My coding skills were still a bit primitive and I couldn't imagine if a situation came up and they went to use it and it failed. Legally or consciously.
We went another couple of years without talking. Those years, I was still going back and forth between my parents' house in Maricopa and Bakersfield trying to get my business off the ground. Most of the time I would use the bus stop at Taft College. Occasionally we'd see each other in passing while he was walking to his car, going home for the day. Sometimes he'd stop and we'd chat for a few minutes but more often than not we would just casually wave at each other.
A few more years passed and I was in my mid-twenties. I have had my own apartment for a few years and enough clients to sustain a small business when Adrian and I reconnected on social media. I asked him if he wanted to get together for dinner and drinks one day just so we could catch up and talk shop. This became a routine, every month or so we'd get together and talk technology, movies, BBQ, whatever.
A while went by before during one of our casual dinners he asked if I could help the college out with a development project. I said of course. And things went on like that for a few more years. We weren't working together all the time but pretty frequently. Sometimes they were projects that only took me two or three hours, others two or three weeks ranging from $120 per hour to $180 per hour.
Until this day we still try and get together every month or so and get caught up over dinner and drinks.