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09/14/2003: "Pocket Guy"

He was about 5 ft. 10 inches tall, trimly built, but with arms and shoulders that looked like he had been doing some weight lifting. It was my first time on site with this client; I had no idea who was who, but every time I left my office I saw this guy. When you're new in a pretty good-sized office, the people you see all blend together at first, but what stood out about this guy was that he was wearing a nylon belt around his hips with four or five pouches attached to it. It looked kind of like a toolbelt that a telephone repairmen might wear, except the pouches were closed and made of nylon instead of the typical leather with tools and tape sticking out of the top of each pouch. Anyway, I guessed he was some kind of network or hardware support guy, so when we were standing by the pop machine together, I introduced myself and said, nodding toward the pouches, "so, you're a network guy?"
"No, I'm a programmer," he said, and began to study the raggedy dollar bill belonging to the guy in front of us while the bill repeatedly slid, rejected, back out of the machine. Click more.. below.

I couldn't stand it, so I finally said, "so, what do you keep in the pouches?"
"Oh, just things."
Now it seemed to get quieter, and I too began to study the raggedy dollar bill. Finally, trying to sound casual, I mumbled something about coming back later, and escaped into the flow of hallway traffic.

I was pretty busy the rest of the morning, and at lunchtime one of the managers I had met dropped by and invited me to lunch with him and some of the other IT people. As we climbed into somebody's van, I noticed that the programmer with the pouches, whom I had begun to think of as "Pocket Guy," was going to lunch with us.

At that time, the jury was still out on the Al Gore vs. George W. election, and all the talk in the van and later in the pizza joint was about the electoral college, what it was, why it was, and what the rules were. Thinking back on it, there must've been a pretty even split between Democrats and Republicans in the group because things had really heated up by the time the pizza arrived at our table. Which candidate was a scumbag and which was a victim of circumstance all boiled down, as I recall, to rules governing the electoral college as set down in the Constitution. Pocket Guy, who wound up sitting next to me, began to twitch and finally reached down and unsnapped one of the pouches on his belt.

Unfortunately, the pouch he was going for was on his opposite side from me, so I couldn't see much. But he reached inside and came up with, incredibly, a copy of the Constitution. It looked like a pamphlet or booklet and was only about two inches by three inches in size. He thumbed through it in record time and came up with the appropriate passages, reading them aloud over the clatter in the restaurant. No one seemed particularly surprised at his having a copy of the Constitution in a pouch dangling from his belt, and I was happy to know at least something of what he kept in the pouches. But I remember noticing that the pouch on his side that was closest to me appeared, at least in my imagination, to be very much the size and shape of a hand grenade. Is it just me?

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