I was planning a blog post for a TSQL2sday..instead would up writing an obituary blog post for a dear friend who passed on yesterday.
Brian Moran was among the older members of the community. I was introduced to him by a mutual friend at a SQL saturday many years ago. I recognized him instantly as the person who with a beard (he didn’t have one when i met him) who wrote articles in SQLServerMagazine. There was one on statistics, i think, which was well written that i could recall well and i spent some time discussing that with him. It was actually a funny discussion because it was a really old article, one that he could not recollect writing, but one that I could recollect really well because it was one I read during my early years as a SQL Server DBA. But he managed to keep up the conversation with ‘hmmm’, ‘did i really say that’, ‘oh wow your memory is great’ and so on. He didn’t seemed bored or tired discussing something that old and was keen we become friends. I appreciated that and it started the beginning of a friendship that will remain among my sweetest memories.
What I really appreciated about Brian was his sense of humor – ability to laugh at just about anything. We were discussing careers once after he moved to microsoft in a sales position, and was doing more recruiting for them. He reached out to me and asked if i’d be interested in a salesy role and i said no, ‘i can’t sell a pin’. At the next sql saturday at DC , I was sitting at the swag table with some PASS Related swag to hand to attendees. There were some pins ..he came up and said ‘what do you have here?’… I handed him a pin, he turned his head and went ‘look what you just did..you sold me a pin..bwahahaha’…and then we met the Microsoft manager for the role, and he introduced me ‘This is Mala, she can sell a pin, really well. She is great ‘…we laughed a good amount of time after that.
I liked how much Brian enjoyed life, or seemed to. He spent a lot of time in beaches, loved naps and wearing crocs around even when he wasn’t at a beach. To me, tech is a way of finding time to do things like that, not an end in of itself and he was exactly that. I also liked informal, sloppy footwear a lot. With an arch problem I could not wear flip flops even when i wanted to and that left me mostly with crocs, most of which were oversized for a female with small feet like me. When i finally found some that matched my size..i actually texted Brian from the shoe store… ‘they are bright yellow, but seem to fit..what do you think?’…he responded ‘go for it!’. I bought those and they are still with me.
In Brian’s memory, when COVID is over, I will wear those bright yellow crocs to the beach..and enjoy a nap after. Or two. And laugh and hug more. RIP dear, kind, funny friend. Thank you for the cheer and brighness you bought all of us.
Curious..about data 