Goodbye, Mike!

This evening, the four of us attended a memorial service for Mike Buell from Jenn's work. We found out last Monday that he had passed away as the result of a heart attack he suffered during work (actually, while they were attempting to get him medical attention). He was 51 years old ... although he was just one day shy of only being 12, I discovered!

I didn't know Mike that well. I'd met him a couple times and heard stories. He seemed like a nice guy, though. He had his peculiarities, but don't we all? And, I know Jenn definitely valued his technical expertise; he'd been at Tinker for 25'ish years (I think)! So, his departure is definitely going to cause some major ripples in the lab; it won't be like when Lizabeth left a couple years ago, after only being there for a little bit. Apparently, he handled a lot of customer questions, and he volunteered a lot of time (he worked a ton of free overtime), so it's going to be interesting to see how they fill the void once things get back to normal (including Jenn returning from maternity leave). It's probably going to have to be a major group effort.