Keith.

When I was working as an AV technician for Taunton’s College, I took on an extra role as an IT Tech too, and I joined an interesting mix of well… we were hardly young, professional, go-getters, but we knew what we were doing.

Starting at roughly the same time as me was one Keith Gordon. A towering, massive, scary looking guy. The sort of guy the students would all move away from when he went out to the smoking area.

When i figured out that I had someone in my team to go out for a fag break with, we soon got to know each other.

Turned out Keith was living in my hometown of eastleigh, in a flat on his own. He’d been through uni studying programming and always said how he’d lost contact with his old classmates and wanted to get back in touch with them. Keith had a mechanical mind, the mind of an inventor, an engineer, just one that’s used to working with different tools… he ached and toiled all day long with theories of how to make a certain task easier, the same things that all the great minds worry about.

Keith really was a talented programmer, kept his own website, and had contributed quite a few very useful applications and utilities both to the open source community and to our team, helping us keep track of which users were taking up the most space on the network, and providing us with a few utilities that showed users what resources were being raped by windows XP etc etc… nerdy stuff. Nerdy stuff that he was really good at… so good at in fact, he even got his programs put on a PC consumer magazine’s cover disc… a bit like a local band getting their new song on a Kerrang! cover CD. Incedentally, he was also a musical bloke, loved his trance and house, and still made music from time to time, I think I’ve still got a few mp3′s he sent me.

Most of all Keith was a good laugh, and his heart was in the right place… he gave me more lifts home than I can remember on a rainy november evening after work, and we’d shared a good few drinks together at the pub in our lunch hours.

As the months dragged on at work, it was pretty apparent that he had some demons, baggage, whatever you want to call it. For someone who appeared to have a very simple life on the outside, as you got to know him you could tell he was a somewhat troubled guy.

I can remember being quite concerned about him a couple of times while we worked together, and after [unsuccessfully] trying to use a budding friendship as leverage to get him to share a problem or two, I made it known to our personnel officer that he was having some problems. They just didn’t seem interested in helping, or maybe they didn’t see what I saw?

In the weeks following that, Keith just kind of faded out at work, I was never really told what happened, all I know is he stopped coming in to work, and left his car in the car park next to the music department. Which is strange when you figure he lived on the other side of the city.

Months went on and I moved on to pastures new, closer to home, and living in the same town, I ran into him in the high street from time to time. We almost always stopped and chatted for a while [not working together doesn't mean you stop having fag breaks together], he was always working on some new application. Every few weeks or so, it was cool to know he was kicking around and that I’d bump into a familiar face.

Then I got a call from Alan, an ex-workmate of ours from a couple of years back, garbled due to poor reception, all I could make out was ‘they found Keith’ and ‘keith’s dead mate’. I’m still in the process of trying to figure out what happened, where and when – all I know right now is that Keith’s gone and it happened in the last few days or so?

It took a little while to sink in, it still is really. What shocked me most was that I never got to see him that one last time, to say Hi, to ask that he was alright. I guess though, with these things, you never do.

So, Keith mate, I don’t particularly believe in ‘what comes after…’, but if you’re anywhere, in any form right now, I would imagine you as having passed into the net, another spirit that’s shaken off it’s carbon and wriggled into the great network, ready to pop up somewhere else in history as a great idea, a split second of inspiration in someone else’s life.

R.I.P. mate, you are already sorely missed.

Benny