Personal Journal

A Death of a Coworker

It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn

Frank Gantt died today, around 6 p.m. eastern, at our satelite facility in New Hampshire. He leaves behind a wife of many years, and a son about 22. Frank was about 45 years old.

Our New Hampshire site has a "boresite" tower - something to focus an antenna dish onto and make sure it moves properly - a derelict piece of technology that we really shouldn't employ anymore, because more advanced means exist to do that operation. The boresite tower is 400 feet high. Frank is 350 pounds... was.

I hear that he slipped, and he fell about 5 or 6 feet before the safety harness engaged, but it failed, and Frank fell 100 feet. He should have never been on that tower, and I hope Honeywell pays his family a shitload of money to compensate for whomever's faulty decision that was to allow the largest, heaviest man we have to climb that fucking thing (let alone to keep using it as a boresite).

But I knew Frank well enough, he was a friend at work, if not outside. And if I know him, he just said he'd do it because someone else didn't want to. You couldn't keep Frank from working. Hard. He wasn't the brightest of our technicians, but he was damn-sure the hardest working. And he had a smile and a laugh for everyone.

We used to talk about computer games all the time, because he took a laptop with him on travel and played lots of computer games on it, and his son worked for a local company building computers. Frank came by a couple weeks ago to tell me about the dream-rig that he gave Frank for his birthday recently. And we talked about what games we were playing.

He was one of the guys who wasn't afraid to come up to me and say personally, "I'm sorry about Jean." He was a wonderful and friendly soul, an optimist, and a builder. He was a great guy, and believe it or not, I can't imagine the suffering his family is going through right now.