Not too long ago, I was asked to speak at the regular meeting of the High Technology Crime Investigation Association here on the Stark State Campus.  My former professor, Glenn Goe, said that he thought that talking about my career in the IT business had some value to the student members of the association, of which I was one.  

Let’s be clear – I love talking about me.  I am my favorite subject.  But the truth is, I didn’t have a clue about what to say.  It’s not as though I have any great pearls of wisdom to offer.  I’m not a deep thinker, so I figured I’d just try to be funny and, like the actor I am, wing it.

I walked into the meeting empty-handed.  No speech.  No script.  Not even some notes from which to cobble together a coherent theme.  I sat and scribbled notes in a small notebook reminiscent of the green notebook that successful Army leaders often carried around with them to take notes.  (And if you must know, no I didn’t carry one around, which really does say a lot about my Army career. I probably should have.)

I wanted to talk about leadership in the IT business, but having never been a leader in the IT business, I was coming up a little short on anecdotes.  With this dearth of information hanging over my head, I switched gears and talked about informal leadership in the technical world and the “Go-To Guy.”

The Go-To Guy is not in a leadership or management position, yet when people need help, they seek out the person who knows stuff, and that’s the Go-To Guy.  (I’ll refer to this as the GTG from now on.  Also, the GTG is a gender-neutral term, so please don’t think I’m excluding half the human population of the world.)  Being the GTG knows no gender, age, race, or pizza sauce preference.  It involves three things:  being curious, sharing what you know, and just paying attention.  I’m concentrating on the last one for the moment, but know that all three have the same priority. 

The first time I recall becoming aware of how important just paying attention is was when I was stationed with the Armed Forces Network station in Bosnia in 1997. 

Let me set this up.

In my freshman year in college in 1974, I decided to take Russian as my foreign language.  I registered for the class and along with a half dozen of my fellow cadets, started class that fall in Hart Hall at Valley Forge Military Junior College. 

Teaching the class was Lieutenant Colonel Richard M. Christenson.  Lt. Col. Christenson was a very unassuming man with a quiet voice and a wicked sense of humor that he shared more freely with the half-dozen Russian students than the well over fifty students in his Western Civilization class that he also taught. 

We all came to find out that Lt. Col. Christenson had been a former CIA agent who had the distinction of having his name printed in Pravda as an enemy of the Soviet state.  Or something like that.  His wife was also a Russian linguist, I believe. When I saw in their home the intricately hand-crocheted, throw pillow with the CIA logo on it, I knew that these people were the real deal.

Anyway, this is to say that my second-semester D in Russian was in no part due to Lt. Col. Christenson.  It was all me.  100%.  And I told him so when I informed him that I wasn’t going to be taking the second two semesters of Russian in my Sophomore year since the D wouldn’t transfer.  He said it was “refreshing” that I owned up to my lousy academic discipline and, with a smile, declared me a “defector”. 

I liked the classes and speaking the language, but writing it was a real bitch.  I didn’t do the homework as I should have and that led to my handwriting in Russian looking like that of a Russian kindergartener that’s had too much caffeine.  The harder it got, the more I hated doing the homework, conjugating verbs, declining nouns and the like, and mastering the cursive version of the Russian letter pronounced “shcha,” (щ).  I pretty much stopped doing homework. 

But I paid attention when I was in class.

Fast forward to 1997.  I am in a Humvee in full battle gear, a 9-millimeter round in the chamber of my pistol in the holster on my shoulder.  We were convoying from Eagle Base near Tuzla to one of the bases in the town of Doboj, I believe.  At the time, all of the shops and buildings that had signs on them were all in the Cyrillic alphabet – the one that I was supposed to have learned in my unsuccessful two semesters of Russian more than twenty years before. 

I looked at the signs, and while I couldn’t read them directly, I recognized the letters and was able to sound out three or four signs as we passed through the heart of the town on our way to the SFOR base.  I remember exclaiming “That sign says ‘Library!’” after sounding out the Cyrillic letters that sounded much like “biblioteka,” библиотека.  I sounded out a few more words, one of which I think was апотека, which when transliterated sounds a little like “apothecary,” an archaic word that means a person who prepared and sold medicines and drugs. It was a pharmacy! The Bosnian version of CVS, I suppose.

That was the moment.  The world changed for me and while those two words and a few others were all I could muster out of my cobweb-infested memory of Russian vocabulary, it was enough.  That was when I realized that I had paid enough attention in Russian class to have some practical application half a world away twenty two years later.  I had actually learned something in a class in which I did horribly.

All because I just paid attention.  I didn’t do the homework.  I didn’t study like a maniac.  I just paid attention. 

Another story from Bosnia I’ll quote here from a previous blog post:

Sidebar: Back then, the Russians weren’t enemies.  They were allies in the NATO Stabilization Force and hence, our friends.  We even socialized from time to time. 

“The Russian PAO major, whose name I regrettably have forgotten, came to the radio station with his interpreter to conduct business of some sort. Summoning up all the courage I had, I said hello to him in Russian based on what I remembered from college over twenty years before. The Russian major’s eyes lit up. He smiled broadly, excitedly shook my hand and said through his interpreter, “You greeted me in our language!” It was a magnificent moment for me and proved to me that you don’t necessarily have to have perfect grades to get something valuable out of academics. You just need to pay attention.”

Countless times since then, I’ve had the need for some trivial information, and lo and behold, it is right there in my cobweb-infested memory of whatever subject in school –- or life — applied.  I’ve used ratio and proportion to reduce the size of a recipe, trigonometry to find a misplaced satellite 23,340 miles away, and contributed positively to two lives all because I paid attention in the Army’s suicide prevention classes.

So pay attention.  Yeah, you think you’ll never need to know something and you’re probably right.  Then again, I never thought I’d be in a town in which all the signs used an alphabet that was completely different from my own.  Yet, there I was, delighting in the joy of understanding something I thought had long been forgotten, and filled with gratitude for Lt. Col. Christenson.  Defector or not, you had a positive influence on my life all because I just paid attention.