There’s this friend-of-a-friend that I torment whenever we meet. He’s a lifetime Canadian military guy, and there’s no end to the barrage of questions I badger him with about where he’s been, the reception he’s received, and which CBC reporters are bastards. The effect of this perpetual exchange is amplified since we always seem to be half-canned at the time.

Skip back to a couple of weekends ago at a wedding we both attended. Despite our synchronized drinking schedule, there was nary a conversation about not having the proper camouflage clothing or enough ammunition for a mission.

Then, by accident, I met his father.

Now, you need to picture the scene: I had stepped out of the reception hall to have a cigarette. His father is an older man, about 60-something I’d wager, and looking quite rough with his nutty hair, and white, wrinkled, button-down shirt. Through a toothy (and I say that politely) smirk, his opening line was, “So you’re a computer geek?”

I answered in the affirmative, and he followed up with, “You’re all Windows, then?” I began mentally preparing for a sympathy conversation in which we’d talk about double-clicking and how damned annoying that little mouse contraption was. I told him that I generally use linux.

“What distribution?”, he says.

What distribution? Are you kidding me? If you’ve ever used linux or installed linux, you know this to be a pretty momentous question that is indicative of at least a casual knowledge of the operating system — even more so since I had waived him as a know-nothing geezer only seconds before.

For 20 minutes or so (or three cigarettes; your choice), he proceeded to boggle me with stories about “coils and diodes”, his first exposure to transistors, and why vacuum tubes were “a pain in the ass”. Turns out that he’s an Electrical Engineer by trade, and has also been in the military most of his life, along with his wife. He planned on being bed-ridden for several months by way of an upcoming operation, so he’d built up a SuSE box to play with.

By the time he left, I was running around and telling anyone who’d listen about how “Doug blew my mind”. Maybe it was fog from the open bar, but I swear, that was a signature moment I won’t soon forget.