One of the things I think we do very well as a group is remember our former employees/friends who are no longer with us. It’s not just the “In Memoriam” section of our website—we genuinely honor these folks in the work we do day in and day out and it matters.
Well today is one of those days where we will recall Jay Otto, our very first engineer who passed away 5 years ago. Jay was a unique guy–very capable technically yet soft spoken and wonderfully kind. He was a former student of Joe Cupp’s at Liberty Christian and went on to learn the ropes at Joe’s first company, taking on D3 support (when it was first ported to Windows NT) and eventually becoming strong on all things Windows/Exchange/Citrix. Pretty much whatever the company needed him to master, he went and figured out which reminds me of our team today.
It was a sad day when Jay’s melanoma relapsed but it was also very rewarding for us all to see him find love albeit late in the game. He married Barbie who worked on our helpdesk for a short time and he experienced fatherhood when Jay Jr. was born shortly thereafter. But his life was cut way to short and the world lost one of the good guys on March 29th.
Jay is honored in The Nerdery, through the Jay Jr. college fund, our trips to Disneyland and the Jay Otto Patrol Station which is an awesome facility at the very top of Snow Summit in Big Bear—go check it out the next time you are skiing and ask a few of his fellow patrollers if they knew him (you’ll be glad you did). But mostly Jay’s spirit lives on in the efforts of our quirky yet oh-so-capable engineers and I like to think that is the best compliment we can continue to pay him. Thank you for all that you do.
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