I got a call from an old friend this evening.

"Ted, this is Nate Kolbaba," he said. "What's up Kolbaba?" It was good to hear from him, even though we were never especially close. I hadn't seen him in about a year, as he had quit Toll Brothers where we both had worked, and taken a job in Barstow. I had been expecting him to call, as my mom related that she had told his sister that I was with an up-and-coming construction company that built locally, and that he was looking for a change.

As Nate explained to me, his house on Julie drive, just around the corner from my parents', wasn't going to sell for anything near what he had bought it for, and that he preferred Tempe to Barstow anyway. If he could find a decent job in town, he'd quit renting in California and reoccupy his own house that had been sitting vacant for months. It would have been a shame, I thought, to sell at such a low price after he had put so much effort into remodelling the place.

Of course, I was in no position to hire him myself. We had graduated from BYU at the same time, and, I'd say, we were in about the same place in life. He had met his wife in college, like I had. He had been the EQ president, and she of the RS. They had gotten to know each other through various acts of selfless service, where it was easy to display their finest qualities. I had always wondered if either was appalled, or at least mildly disenchanted, when they came to realize that the other was just another person, sans halo.

Nate was in commercial construction now, which was the area I was working in as well. As he described his recent experience, I chuckled at recollections of him making to-do lists for his suburban houses with a hand-held recorder, addressing himself in the second person ("Don't forget to call in the frame inspection when you get back to the office"). We had gone to get the recorders together. They interfaced quite easily and the sound was passable. They used compact flash cards for memory and could store eight hours of audio. I had used mine for a total of four hours (not continuously) before I consigned it to the junk drawer. I was never one for making lists. Fortunately, the company had paid for it. I got about a week of fun out of Nate's recorder, however. I was impressed that he never quit addressing himself as 'you'.

Nate had been building a tank maintenance facility for the US Army, which I thought was a pretty rad project. He described the gigantic garage doors and the legions of tanks rolling in for upkeep, right through his construction zone. How fitting for him, I thought, since he wasn't unlike a tank himself. He had played football at BYU, and was very formidable due to his size and strength. Of course, with his cheerful tenor voice and jolly round face, perhaps he better resembled Thomas the Tank Engine. Though I was doing office buildings for the most part, the systems were typically similar, and I thought that it wouldn't be a difficult transition for him to make.

I asked him if he had gotten much field experience, as my company might be more likely to hire a superintendent than a PM or engineer. He proceeded "I worked as an Assistant Project Manager at Toll Brothers, which is a national luxury home builder..." He proceeded to describe to me all about his work at Toll as though I were a complete stranger! He had gotten my name and number from his sister, who got it from my mother, who knew that I knew Nate. They had, quite naturally, assumed that they were simply passing on a number that he must have lost when his other phone died, or when he changed companies and had to turn in his junky Kyocera. Although I had been talking to Nate as though I'd known him for years, which I had, he had no idea that I was the same Ted Hawkes of Tempe, Arizona, nor did he ever entertain the notion that I might be! How friendly I must have seemed!