Out of the Past - Part 1

Over the past few months, for reasons I don't fully understand, I've experienced a series of reconnections with people from my past. Some of them very far in the past. While I can't explain why this seems to be happening right now, I can explain how.

The proliferation of networking websites allows all of us to establish a cyber-presence that makes our existence accessible to the world. Sites like Facebook and MySpace are quite well known and seem to be the most popular, particularly with a slightly younger set than me. While I rarely use those, I do frequent a more business oriented site - LinkedIn.

This started with me connecting to mostly people I currently work with but has managed to open the doors through various organizational connections to a number of other folks. You can search by schools, for instance. One of my recent reconnections was through this means, seeing a school listed that I actually knew someone from. The other common connection is through work history, finding a company I'd worked for in the past and then searching for everyone else that has that same connection. That's how Ron Bailey came to light.

While browsing through a recent connection to me, I saw that GTE (now Verizon) was listed as a former employer. That reminded me of Ron Bailey. Ron and I had started our IT careers at nearly the same time after we graduated from the same training program at a business college in the Seattle area. While working together at GTE we became fast friends and shared a number of common interests that led us to a rewarding friendship. Over time, life's complications managed to insert a wedge between us that ultimately resulted in us drifting apart and eventually losing track of one another completely. The last time we spent any time together would have been about 1986 or so - I'm not entirely certain of the year. I'd tried uncovering his whereabouts from time to time using the trusty method of Google and had come up with nothing. Even though I worked daily with a number of people from the old GTE era, none of them had any idea either. Then came LinkedIn.

I pulled up all the Ron Baileys on LinkedIn and emailed each of them describing our connection from GTE. A couple of days later an email arrived and sure enough, I'd found him. It turns out we had been working two blocks apart for the past five years of so. Or at least a number of years.
Clearly a lot has changed in the intervening time but it was terrific to find we still recognized one another in spite of the passage of time. We've managed to get together a couple of times to visit and I look forward to many more opportunities to do so. There is a whole world of experiences in our past to share, and a whole world yet to come. Welcome back to my world Ron Bailey!! It's good to have you back.