From the Editor’s Desk: More Stories (Premium)

I collect little stories so I can add them to bigger pieces I’m writing where appropriate. But here are two that never found a home, plus a third one that just came up. No, none of them are related in any way.

—

I can’t recall if I ever told this story, so apologies if I have. But Mary Jo and I had drinks with Terry Myerson after he had announced that he was leaving Microsoft, and I finally asked him a question that had been bugging me, to that point, for over a year: how had he lost so much weight?

Terry told us that just as he had assumed the Windows lead role at Microsoft, he had to visit Finland and some places in Europe to welcome Nokia’s employees into the fold, but he had been given some bad news by Satya Nadella: Microsoft was already taking steps to kill Windows Phone, and most of those new employees would soon be scrambling to find new roles, many outside of Microsoft, as most of them were going to be laid off. So Terry met with an endless parade of people on the trip, all excited for their new roles at Microsoft, and unaware of how quickly it would all come crashing down.

But Terry did as he was told, returned to Seattle, and then helped dismantle the Windows Phone business over the next several months. He was consumed by stress the entire time, knowing how many lives were upended by this decision, and when the dust finally settled, Terry, who I never considered overweight, had lost weight. A lot of weight.

“Come on, Terry,” I responded. “I can’t lay off tens of thousands of Nokia employees. Surely you have some other advice?”

“Just eat less and exercise more,” he told me, as I burst out laughing. Useful! (OK, he also mentioned that he started doing all in-person meetings as walks around Microsoft’s campus, which I assume some people found irritating.)

I miss that guy.

—

My cousin Michael is about ten years older than I am, and he lived outside of New Orleans for much of his adult life, and so I’d visit him and his family when I was in town for Microsoft conferences. Once, we were skiing with my father up in Durango, Colorado, and he told me about a time he was driving home from New Orleans across Lake Pontchartrain, speeding in his classic Trans Am. A cop hiding in a side area somewhere on the long bridge flashed the lights and pulled him over.

“Do you have any idea how fast you were going?” the officer asked him when he approached the car.

No, Michael apologized: he had gone to the doctor that day and found out he had testicular cancer. And he’d been wandering around in a daze ever since. He was just messed up inside.

“Son,” the cop said, “no one should have to go through what you’re going through. But please, just slow it down.” He then left without giving him a ticket.

“Michael, I had no idea you went through that,” I said. “Are you OK?”

He burst out laughing. “I’ve never had testicular cancer.”

—

We ended up renting a U-Haul van twice during our recent move, both times because it made more sense than making multiple trips between a home and a storage facility. This is the type of thing most people don’t do very often, but between the two vans and the 15-foot truck we also rented to move the furniture, we started getting pretty good at it. During the first van rental, I heard a woman who worked at U-Haul telling a different customer that the van he was getting was named Van Diesel and that he should take care of it because it was new. The person we dealt with never mentioned any names, but I thought it was silly anyway.

When we came back the second time, we were helped by the other woman and, sure enough, she told me that the van we were getting was named Van Diesel, and so I assumed we got the same van as that other guy had gotten and was happy to leave it at that. But then my wife asked her, “You call all the vans Van Diesel, don’t you?” which is something I’m not sure I would have thought of. And sure enough, the woman admitted to that, and on we went.

Days later, literally, my wife and I were on a walk and this conversation suddenly jumped into my head. “I don’t get the Van Diesel thing,” I said. “Why even give something a name if you’re just going to use the same name for all of them?” (Seriously, this is how I spend my free time, worrying about this kind of thing.)

She wasn’t sure, but she said it was probably hard to come up with good names.

“Hard? How about Van Halen, Van Morrison, or Van Damme?” I blurted out. “Van Diagram for crying out loud. Come on! I could do this all day.”

Some people just don’t have good imaginations.