In this episode, we continue discussing my brief two years working at the IU Department of Medical Genetics. I tell the story of my friendship with one of my department colleagues.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 78 of Contemplating Life.

In this episode, we continue talking about my brief two years working at the IU Department of Medical Genetics.

In a previous episode, I mentioned a guy who worked there whose name I couldn’t remember. I decided to call him Joe. Anyway, he left the department, leaving a vacancy. Apparently, he was supposedly the manager of the computer group. I never really thought we had anyone who was officially “in charge.” I know he took a lot of responsibility for doing routine maintenance tasks such as backups. But it didn’t feel like we were taking orders from him. It was more of a group effort under Gersting and the geneticists.

Shortly after Joe left, they began interviewing the staff one by one in private. I met again with Dr. Merritt and Dr. Gersting, who had interviewed me for the job initially. They wanted to know if I was happy working there. Did I have any complaints? Just general personnel review kinds of questions.

They then said they were looking for someone to be the project manager. They wondered if I was interested in a managerial position. I quickly said, “No.”

Merritt seemed surprised. His image of me was that I was ambitious. He saw I liked to take charge in some of the meetings. I explained to him what I talked about a couple of episodes ago. I saw my job as sometimes being the middleman or the English language interpreter between the genetics staff and the programming staff. I told them both directly to their faces that sometimes they got so stuck in their own jargon that they were speaking plain English. I had to rephrase everything that was being said just so the other side could understand it.

I don’t recall specifically what their reaction was to my accusation. I’m probably describing it more harshly here than I did to their face. But I’m certain that they knew I was right because they had seen me do it on many occasions. I think somehow Merritt interpreted my need to take charge of the conversation in those instances as a desire to run the show. I suppose if I had been in charge, it would have made it easier to keep people focused and communicating in ways that were productive and improving the quality of the debate.

I made it clear to them that I had no ambitions for a management position, even if it came with more money. Sure, a raise would be great. Everybody wants one of those. But I would have felt quite uncomfortable trying to supervise Dale and Linda, who had been working there much longer than me. Furthermore, I did not want the headache of a managerial position. I didn’t need that kind of pressure.

A few weeks later, they hired a new guy to replace Joe. His name was Roy Buzdor. He was a short, chubby guy with a round face and a bushy mustache. He spent most of his time in his office, not interacting with the rest of us very much at first. When he did interact with us, he acted like he was running the place.

At some point, one of us, I don’t think it was me, asked him, “Who put you in charge?”

He replied, “Dr. Merritt did. He hired me as the project manager.”

Nobody bothered to tell us. It was clear he was Joe’s replacement, but we never thought of Joe as being in charge. Maybe that was his official title. That made things go a little easier between this goofy guy with a funny name who was suddenly in charge. We could focus on our anger on Merritt and the other bosses for not telling us that they hired this guy to be in charge. And I was no fan of Merritt, to begin with, so it was easy to blame it all on him. I think the other gals were more upset than I was. They had seniority, yet the bosses brought in a new stranger and put him in charge. I’m certain I would’ve gotten a lot of ill will if I had been put in charge ahead of them.

With this new perspective on what happened and some time to get to know the guy, things warmed up a bit. It’s always tough for a new guy to assimilate. Being thrust into a management position when no one knew that was your job had to be very rough for him.

One day, someone in the lab was about to have a birthday. Someone purchased a birthday card, and it was passed around for everyone to sign. Even if you didn’t know the person personally, when it was their birthday, you would sign the card and have a piece of cake. When I went to sign it, I could see that the new guy had already signed it with the nickname “Buz.”

I asked him, “Do people call you ‘Buz’?”

He said, “Yes.”

From that point forward, he was no longer Buzdor. He was Buz. For some strange reason, that made a difference.

Buzdor was a goofy name for a goofy guy.

Buz was cool. A guy named Buz had walked on the moon. That was cool. Suddenly, our new guy Buz was cool too.

By the way, this was more than a decade before the movie “Toy Story” and Buzz Lightyear.

Very quickly, Buz and I became good friends. We were both computer nerds, and we loved sci-fi and comics. Once we got to know each other, we hit it off great.

Buz, his wife, and two sons lived in an apartment about a mile west of my house near 34th St. and I-465. Buz and I started getting together outside of work. He would come over about one evening a week, and we would tinker around with my personal computers. He would help me with hardware issues, and we would play computer games. Occasionally, we would go see a movie together. Eventually, he purchased a PC of his own, and he would take me over to his apartment to show it to me. We would work on it together. We would download free or shareware utility software from CompuServe. I will devote a future episode to the details of my first PC.

We had lots of fun at work as well. The computer terminal Buz used in the department was a very expensive graphics terminal called a Digital Equipment Corporation GT-40. It was actually a computer in its own right. It consisted of a PDP 11/10 processor, 8k of memory, a keyboard, a green phosphor monitor, and a light pen. The department had purchased it in the hopes that we could use its graphics capabilities to display and edit family trees, but we never came close to developing that software.

The GT-40 used vector graphics. Most computer monitors used a raster scan, which is the same method used by old analog TVs. The electron gun of the CRT moves across the screen row by row, illuminating phosphor dots. These dots, which we call pixels, create text or graphics. However, a vector terminal like the GT-40 worked differently. The electron gun would zigzag around the screen, actually drawing letters or graphic symbols similar to the way a laser light show can draw things. Because it takes a long time to draw each character on the screen using this method, the display would have an annoying flickering. It used green phosphors because they stay illuminated longer after the electrons stop hitting them. This reduces the flicker, but the flicker can get annoying in a vector graphics terminal like this one.

The GT 40 was quite famous for a videogame called “Lunar Lander.” You would have an icon of a lunar module flying around in space. You would use the light pen to touch the screen the same way you would use a stylus on a modern tablet. You would point at control arrows on the screen that would increase or decrease the braking thrust as well as the orientation of your spaceship. Numbers across the top of the screen would give you your remaining fuel, altitude, horizontal and vertical velocity, and distance to your landing zone.

The goal was to land at the designated landing point without running out of fuel. If you were successful, a tiny astronaut stick figure would climb out of the lunar module and walk into a nearby building with two arches outside. It was a McDonald’s hamburger restaurant on the moon. Buz and I spent many lunch hours playing that game (some longer than an hour). See the links in the description for more info on the GT 40 terminal and its famous lunar landing game.

I found a video online and the guy who restored a vintage GT 40 terminal and got the lunar lander game working on it. He doesn’t have a clear video of the game in progress. All of the videos of him giving a presentation at a conference. You can’t see the screen very clearly.

Eventually, the genetics department began to run out of money. I will explain the details in another episode. But this episode is really about my relationship with my friend Buz. I don’t want to take time out from that by going off on a tangent about department funding.

The short version is that when it became highly probable that the project was about to end, the other programmers began looking for new jobs. They had families to feed and bills to pay. I was living at home with my parents and if I was unemployed for several months until I found a new job it wasn’t going to hurt me.

Linda, the divorcee who continued to sleep with her ex-husband, was the first to go. Then, Buz found a job working for Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals. They used HP computers in their laboratories, and Buz had previous experience with that brand. Buz had a Master’s degree in chemistry, so working in a genetics lab and then a pharmaceutical company was a natural choice for him.

I was really going to miss him at work, but it didn’t hurt our friendship at all because we were still getting together at least once a week outside of work.

Dale was the next to leave, leaving me as the last programmer there. When people started leaving, we had a fixed amount of money remaining. So every time someone left, there was more money for the rest of us before it ran out. I’m unsure how long I could have worked there on what was left when the other three people quit.

I developed health problems and had to quit shortly after Dale left. There will be a lot more details about my health condition and my departure from the department in future episodes.

Even after I had to quit work, Buz remained a very loyal friend.

He was a devout Methodist. He had been raised in a strict Baptist family, but when he went to college, he met people who were not as strict but were still devout Christians. He realized that some of the things that he was raised to believe were taboo really were not. You can go to R-rated movies, drink moderately, listen to rock music, and still be a good Christian. That’s when he converted to a different denomination.

At the time, I was completely away from the Catholic Church and seriously agnostic, if not totally atheist. We would have interesting theological discussions. Even if I was no longer involved in the church, I could still argue from the Catholic perspective. He didn’t pressure me to return to church, but he did encourage me to be open to the possibility. When I did get involved in the church again, he was very pleased, even if it was Catholicism and not a Protestant denomination.

I suggested that he was the most Catholic Protestant I had ever known, and he thought I was the most Protestant Catholic he had ever known. Neither of us was insulted by that description. We really respected one another.

In one of our theological discussions, he talked about avoiding sin. He taught me things I later incorporated into my lessons where I taught religion at St. Gabriel.

He said that it was improper to ask if something was or was not a sin. He said that when you ask such a question, it’s because you want to know exactly where the line is so you don’t cross it. Why do you need to know exactly where it is? That’s because you want to see how close you can come to the line without crossing. His approach was that you should know the general direction of where that line was and stay as far away from it as you could.

He said if you tiptoe up to that line, sometimes you stumble and cross it, so just don’t approach it. You should be asking how far away I can stay from the line so that when I mess up, I don’t cross it. I just get closer, but then I notice it and work my way back onto the right path.

I expanded upon his idea when I taught this lesson.

I said that when you ask, “Where is the line so I don’t cross it?” you are really saying, “How bad can I be before I get caught?” People do that all the time. They ask questions like, “How many miles an hour can I go over the speed limit before I get a ticket?” Or, “How many questionable deductions can I take on my taxes before it triggers an audit?”

Instead of asking, “Where is the line so I don’t cross it?” You should say, “How good can I be so that when I’m not my best, I’m still plenty good.”

I would give the following example.

Suppose you are engaged to be married, and you have the following conversation with your future spouse.

“Darling, you know that I love you very much.”

“And I love you too.”

“I would never want to do anything to hurt our relationship.”

“And I would never hurt you as well.”

“I’m in this for the long haul and never want to divorce you.”

“Okay… I would hope not.”

“So, tell me, dear, what the minimum I must do to keep you from ever wanting to divorce me so I know that I will never go below the minimum.”

At that point, your fiancé probably will cancel the wedding. If you are concerned with only doing the minimum to avoid divorce, then you are not very serious about having a good relationship.

Yet, when you ask, “Is this a sin?” that is exactly what you are doing in your relationship with God. You are asking what is the minimum that I have to do to avoid going to hell.

Buz taught me that lesson, which has lived on in my teaching for decades.

Later, Buz picked up some side programming jobs working for a local blood lab. They wouldn’t hire him on his own, but they agreed that if he worked for a software firm that they could invoice as a company, they could hire him as an independent contractor. I had my own one-man computer consulting company at the time, so I agreed to consider him my employee. I would bill them for his work, take a small percentage off the top, and pay him the rest.

Buz was a great help when I developed computer software for my disabled friend, Christopher Lee. The YouTube version includes photos of Buz and me working with Christopher.

One day, Buz accompanied me to Saint Gabriel’s because I needed to rewire the keyboard on their PC so that I could operate the shift and control buttons. I was typing with a stick in those days, so I had to have buttons on the end of a wire that I could hold in my left hand to hold down these modifier keys while typing with the stick in my right hand. I remember Fr. Paul asking him what kind of degree he had, hoping it had something to do with computers or electronics. When Buz said his degree was in chemistry, Father got a weird look on his face. I told him, “Don’t worry. We both know what we are doing.”

By the way, I wasn’t the only person who ended up using those extra buttons. A former associate pastor named Fr. Bob Klein had a stroke at a young age and lost much of the use of the left side of his body. He returned to Saint Gabriel’s and was cared for by a guy named Chuck, who lived in the parish rectory to help the priests. Fr. Bob made good use of those buttons for many years, thanks to Buz.

Eventually, Buz was laid off from Eli Lilly. He found a job in East Lansing, Michigan, and moved his family there. We stayed in touch via email. Every couple of years, he would come back to Indiana to visit friends and relatives and would visit with me. In October 1990, when I went to visit my friend Joyce in Detroit, he drove over from East Lansing, and we visited. The last I saw him in person was sometime in 2009. I don’t remember the exact date, but I know we went to see the original Avatar in IMAX 3D, which was released in 2009.

His son Nathan developed Hodgkinson’s disease as a young adult and eventually succumbed to it. It was a test of his faith, but because Buz was of such strong faith, he was able to endure this tragic loss. He videotaped the celebration of life for his son and sent me a copy because I had the ability to convert it to a DVD. Nathan also went by the nickname “Buz,” and it was eerie to hear his friends eulogize their late friend “Buz.”

My friend Buz later developed serious health problems and eventually had to quit work. In late March 2020, I had not heard from him in a few months. I emailed his wife and learned that he had succumbed a few weeks prior.

Buz once told me that he looked forward to the day when we would meet in heaven and we could walk up to each other and give each other a big hug. I told him that I thought in heaven I would still be in a wheelchair because this disability is so much part of my life. The thing that would be different in heaven was it wouldn’t matter that I was in a wheelchair. I told him that he and other friends and family already treated me in such a way that the wheelchair didn’t matter, which made it like heaven on earth.

He presumed, as did I, that he would outlive me, given my fragile health. Now, I am the one who will have to wait for the day when we can be reunited in the next life. And I will get to tell him, “I told you so,” when I roll up to him in my heavenly wheelchair.

Until then, my friend Buz, rest in peace.

In our next episode, we will discuss my remaining work at the department and the circumstances under which I eventually left for health reasons.

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