Faco. This is the only person whose name I will mention within this whole chronicle of my work history. Faco. I’m not even going to mention his full name. It’s not required. “Faco” was his stage name. Sort of like “Prince”, or “Madonna” or a hurricane. No need to mention his last name. Everyone in our building knew him. He had a major in Industrial Engineering. However, he had no challenges when it came to join the team and behave like a full-fledged telecommunications engineer. His first role (of many in the team) was as a topographic transmission planner/surveyor. It took him no time to learn those skills. He was in charge of going to the far edges of the then fast growing mobile network in order to give the green light to continue the expansion. I saw him in action. He was excellent. He could grab his binoculars, climb a tower and shout out loud from the top: “there. We are going to link this new site right there”. I would turn around and face in the direction he was pointing at but could see nothing but the horizon. I had nothing else to say but “alright, man. If you say so…”

 

But being a great surveyor, master of the topographic studies, is not why anybody would recall him. Faco was very easygoing and friendly. A natural born comedian, with a sarcastic grin painted on his face most of the time. He once called me at 2:30 am to ask me if I knew the lyrics of the Elton John song from the movie “The Lion King”, only to abruptly hang up shortly after I said “well..um…yeah, I guess”. Or sometimes he would just call you randomly and ask you “Do you like black beans?”, and then would immediately hang up. Pretty much he was the ultimate prankster in the team. It is not hard to remember his laughter while mocking at any of us, as you would hear it so often in the office that you couldn’t help but laugh along.

 

Also, the guy absolutely impressed me with how quickly he would learn something new, sometimes related to his job but mostly things completely unrelated to his profession. She showed up one day and said: “I think I want to buy a motocross bike”. He, then, bought it and started riding it every weekend. Granted, he broke one leg after a few weeks, but that didn’t deter him. He mastered that skill. And I really thought he had lost it when he said “I am going to build a house”. That was not the typical way to say I will pay someone to design it and build it for me then I will move in. Nope. Not the case here: he actually designed his country house. And he built it. When most of the twenty something kids are nowadays (and were then) longing for Friday to arrive so they could get completely wasted, Faco’s objective was to hit the road on Friday evenings, driving for more than 3 hours, to get to the construction site.

 

His next challenge:  become a pilot. I think that he got bitten by the bug while playing “Flight Simulator” on the computer.  I don’t know. He started taking his lessons over several months and was really close from getting his license. He only needed to complete the mandatory amount of flight hours and that was it. The then industrial engineer/telecom surveyor/motocross daredevil/architect/civil engineer was about to add a new notch to his accomplishments belt: private pilot.

Back then, in 2006, Faco and I had a similar arrangement to the one I once had with my boss at my first job: he would split some of his overtime work hours and vacation days into “out of office hours”, so he could go and add some flight time whenever it was convenient to him. One day he told me: “tomorrow I will be off the whole day. I will be flying”, so I agreed.  The very next day, in the early afternoon, one of our teammates approaches me with a somber face and says “We have a problem. The control tower lost contact with Faco’s plane for over an hour”. I heard that phrase and I didn’t think that anything wrong was happening. I asked him: “have they tried his cell?” Then I instantly grabbed my phone and dialed him up. No answer. And just then was when it sank in: the control tower had lost contact with the plane…for over an hour. Why was I calling a cell phone to try to reach him? That is the first reaction: denial. “Come on. It’s Faco”, I said. “He must be pulling our legs here. It must be one of his pranks”.

 

It wasn’t. A few hours after that a convoy had been arranged, with the local authorities and people from our team, to search the suspected crash area. It was a remote region, between mountains, with no road access. Everybody did the best they could, but the cold weather and darkness of the night were making the search effort difficult. The remaining of the plane was found the day after. 3 other people were on the plane. No survivor. The irony of it all: Faco wasn’t the pilot at the time of the crash. He was on the plane only accumulating flight hours.

 

I could expand on how sad it was the whole experience at a personal level. How everybody was in suspense, waiting to hear positive news, only to see all hope on everybody’s increasing gloomy faces fading away as hours were passing by. I could describe how difficult it was for some of us to try to ease the pain and comfort his family, especially his mom. I could describe how a vast amount of people manifested their presence in that difficult time, friends, colleagues, vendors, family, etc. How we all went to say the final goodbye to him at the very same place where he built his house, etc. There won’t be enough space here to write that part of the story. For now, I will try to keep this whole episode centered on how work was affected by this tragedy.

 

Just like that, one of us was gone. Faco’s was never going to sit down by his desk again. The vibe in the office changed. We realized how fragile life is. How life doesn’t care if you are 99 or 27: when it’s your time it’s your time. And, as cruel as that sounds, that desk had to be occupied by somebody else. Life lesson #11: especially in the corporate environment: “Show must go on”. 1 month after the tragic accident, we started the interviews. Hiring somebody to replace Faco was not an easy task. Both professionally and at a personal level, whoever was hired to replace him had some big shoes to fill. Who were we going to hire that would fit in the team? I must admit that I was discouraged, and I started looking for a “clone” of Faco, and not just a suitable engineer at the professional level. That was my bad. The next guy wasn’t the one to blame for something he had no control of. I ended up going the down the easy road and hired an internal resource. I thought it was going to be the easiest transition for the entire team. It worked, yet you could see that jokes between us in the team were less frequent. There was a different mood.

 

After a while, work life went back to normal. No major events until 3 months before I left Orange. I would say that the 6 years and 5 months that I stayed at Orange were the backbone of my career and my personal life, where I made a lot of friends and stayed until July 2007. I honestly wouldn’t be where I am now had I not had all the opportunities and knowledge I gathered there in the telecommunications world.  Then why did I leave? Good question. Let’s see:

 

Chapter 4 . The Red Era. Still counting!

 

Did I mention earlier that it was hard to quit a job where they treat you well? Please scratch that. Doing that in 2001 took me barely a couple of days to decide and a 30 mins chat with my then boss. Yes. It was hard. But do you want to know what is REALLY hard? To this date, there hasn’t been a single more stressful moment in my life than the 6 months surrounding my decision in 2007 to, not only quit my job at Orange, but move to another country.

 

To be continued…