i need to say my piece here, i feel a more public forum is inappropriate: it’s too broad, the audience too wide, i would come off as too pretentious. so i choose to do it here, where some of you knew sajjad as long as i did, some of you didnt know him at all and others who knew him from the very beginning.

i am devasted. truly and resolutely devasted.

sajjad was, is, was, no, IS one of the sweetest kindest people i have ever met. he always helped you. he always forgave you. he always thanked you. he laughed with you. he had your back when things went sideways. he had no ego whatsoever. he was committed to the people around him. he shaped the culture around him, he was a balm to all the ills and stresses that comes from working for an MSP.

when he went to texas, i missed him, i missed hearing him say “…or whatevah” from across the aisle. but just as he set the tone in ny, he did the same in tx. he raised the bar in how to be a professional while also having an unoffensive and contagious sense of humor. he laughed easy, he tackled complicated problems with curiousity and eagerness to learn what he did not understand.

he then went to the UK to be our point person for one of our most complex and demanding clients. even i was unsure if he could handle it. this same client almost broke me. but he didn’t break. he mastered it. he had them eating out of his hand. he was confident and knowledgeable. he put them in his rearview mirror.

when he came back to the ny office, it was wildly different. we broke down the wall between us and the office next door. we took it over, we grew. we weren’t just an aisle or two apart. but still, i was happy, the way you are when you’re working with an old friend from that other company you both started your careers in long ago.

now he’s gone. my friend is gone. in a time when i barely had any time to talk to him as a human being, to just shoot the shit. i had his back like he had mine when i first started work wise, but between this virtuality we are all now living in and the demands of the day to day, i barely had time.

i wish i could hear, outside of my head, outside of my memories, his voice, one more time saying, an end to a sentence on some complicated technical thing, “…or whatevah”