Becoming Chris Nichols

It is maybe 1992 and I am a System’s Engineer with the VM Systems group for Bank of America. I worked in the operating systems part of the group, something I took pride in and derived ego from. Chris sat in the next row of cubicles from mine. I didn’t know much of what he did day to day, besides being the CMS guru. (if you don’t know what CMS is, it was the PC operating system on mainframes before PCs)

We were building CMS OS images for each system (node), a total of maybe eight, not counting prev/next versions. I asked about why each node got their own image and learned the only difference was the system specific information like name and timezone. So I modified our build process to do just one full build and then copy the original file making the system specific changes to the image on the fly. It ended up saving several hours worth of work (elapsed) for our build engineer, Vito. But before we went live with the system, Vito asked that I check with Chris to see if the scheme would work.

I had what I thought was a specific question for Chris including details of the build image change - would there be any side effects or anything else I need to consider? I didn’t get an answer to that question. But I got stories, boy did I get stories. Wonderful stories about CMS’s history including some of the old timers who worked on it. I wish I could remember the details of his tales, but like I said it was a long time ago. When after a month or two I came with another question, he’d repeat the stories as if they were the first time he told them and I nodded along as if it was the first time I heard them.

I worked with Chris for 10 years and for the whole time, the pattern repeated. When I went to him with questions about our internal email system (Profs) which we were migrating to Office Vision, he’d tell me stories of the email system before Profs and all the features it had. How when we did the migration from the old system to Profs, we promised to close the feature gap. We never did. And he’d tell me about the people who worked on the original system. Again, I wish I could remember the details. And again, Chris would repeat these stories to me whenever I had a new question about the email system. And I’d nod my head, pretending not to already know the next turn in the story.

And for these past five years (2019-2024), ever since I joined the Bing Platform team, I felt I was turning into Chris Nichols. People would come to my office and ask a question or answer one of mine and it would just be a vehicle for me to tell a story. For some, I could see the story resonated, for others, the realization the question was not going to be answered. I’ve seem to have lost interest in the details. I was more interested in the nuance and the people. I had become Chris Nichols.

Chris Nichols was a great guy and a great colleague. We shared a San Franciscan’s sense of humor, dry with room for plenty of double entendres. Him dressing as a banker one Halloween. One of my first memories of Chris - I was brand new to the team and assigned a senior manager as a mentor. She took me to a Japanese restaurant next to Todos Santos plaza. I ordered a bento box which I never had before. It came with sushi which I also never had before. As I pretended not to be bothered by the raw fish, I told my mentor that the team was so, so serious. My voice, which is normally a whisper, was loud and I looked around to see if anyone noticed. That’s when I saw Chris and a colleague and the table to my right, laughing their heads off at my remark. I wished I knew him better and could remember him better. I had only begun to hear his stories.

When I left Bank of America, he gave me a collection of gifts or mementos that were funny in a uniquely San Francisco way. I never did open that can of cow brain.

I could do far worse than turning into him. It’s kind of what I’m doing with this blog.