Never met a fight he didn’t like to pick
I had just made one of the biggest decisions in my life on earth and agreed to fly from the relative warmth and safety of my home town Brighton, to the unknown of Montreal. The plan was that a group of people from the test house I worked for would be going over to train up the new Quality Assurance (QA) people and show them how it was done.
We got there in late October, we were jet lagged and dubious. Montreal was just another North American city, right?
Our first day was the day after Halloween had passed and I had been assigned 3 testers. A nervous French Canadian, an older guy named Traie, and soul-patched, mountain of a person named Josh.
I was hungover (this surprises no one) but set about reviewing their bugs on the project and spent time chatting to each of them. At one point during lunch Josh shows me a picture on his phone, sly grin on his face.
“This was me yesterday, for Halloween.”
My eyes almost popped out of my head.
Here was this 6ft+ man, all 300 pounds of him, soul patch fully on display, dressed up as a woman.
Montreal was not just another North American city.
Over the coming days I got to know them all a bit better, Josh and Traie especially. Josh was gregarious and warmhearted, with long rambling stories that felt like they might be allegories if he ever got to the point. Traie was quick-witted, andprone to poking fun at Josh. In turn, Josh took a joke well even if he occasionally got carried away, quick to overreact but almost as quick to forgive.
A conversation I will always treasure that cemented the dynamic between us was when I started talking about a comic I was reading to Traie. On hearing the conversation, Josh piped up:
“You guys like comics?” Josh looked excited at the prospect.
Traie got a look in his eye that I couldn’t quite interpret. We nodded.
“So, here’s the thing.” Josh started enthusiastically. “Why the hell do they let Tony Stark use the Iron Man suit? He’s just a guy that gets enhanced by the suit. Right?”
I was immediately lost by this, it had to be written all over my face. This did not deter Josh even for a second:
“Now, see, what they should do is give the suit to Captain America, or Spider-man. Imagine what they could do.”
Traie turned and looked at me and said:
“See, this is why I never tell anyone I like comic books.”
It wasn’t until many years later, after the release of Iron Man 3 that Traie conceded that Josh was right Tony Stark did not deserve to be in the suit if just about anyone could pilot it. Goddamn nerds.
A great lover of pranks, Josh was also remarkably game for getting pranked. I remember we once convinced him that one of Co-ordinators and the CEO of the company had matching tattoos to mark a sworn oath. Naturally they hid them with their beards so that no one could see them. I am not sure if I ever told him the truth of my deceit.
He was eager to get along with people too, a teetotaller (he spoke of an incident of one time in his youth when he had got drunk and knocked over a giant glass door in a shopping center and had sworn ‘never again’) he decided to bring some beers over to my apartment for a fighting game tournament. However, he brought these ‘Coronitas’ that were like 20cl in size and I couldn’t help but laugh.
Josh soon rose up through the ranks, from senior QA, to QA Co-ordinator. He had this gift/curse of being able to speed read like no one I’d ever met and it made him incredible at processing bugs. Things changed a bit as he grew to have more responsibility (I think it impacted us all) and there would be moments where his passion and earnestness meant that he stood up for what he saw as right. He never backed down from a fight if he thought he was right, and that was often. Maybe a little too often as sometimes that made him enemies, but there was no denying he could be funny as hell about it.
For example, in one meeting one of the QA Co-Ordinators complained about the quality of the testers we were getting and asked:
“Where are we getting these bad testers?”
To which Josh replied:
“Your mom.”
The Co-Ordinator’s brother was one of the new testers.
Comics and jokes were definitely Josh’s second and third loves behind food. The man could polish off a poutine before the gravy had had time to drip down to the plate. I was in awe of his ability to demolish a burger, many a time on late night shifts he made sure to get two ‘just in case’. There was one type of food, though, that he absolutely could not handle. Even the slightest hint of spice would have him in paroxysms of pain. I once saw him get the wrong food that had standard mustard on it and it caused him to squeal in agony and need several glasses of water.
That wasn’t the only thing that caused him grief. Over and over again there would be some project like Army of Two or Call of Duty 3, that needed his eye for detail. Even if the management would sometimes see him as a huge pain in the arse due to his refusal to back down. Josh had a knack for being right but man, he did not pick his fights well.
I left the company a while after that, to try and drink my way through whatever alcohol supply there was in Europe but I was always glad to share an email with Josh. When he was away from work and it wasn’t winding him up he was a generous, funny soul. He kept an eye and ear out for me even if we did end up arguing over minutiae of some game or semantic.
I came back to Montreal about a year later to rejoin the company, and it was at that point that Josh had entered into an extended passive-aggressive foray with the General Manager and the QA Manager in our office. There always seemed to be some new thing where they clashed and it was clear that trouble was brewing.
Our company was bought out and new management came in. In the reshuffle Josh was let go. It made no sense in terms of his work performance but made complete sense from a dynamic with him and the General Manager. This was an easy moment to let him go. Morale dropped in the office as a result of this, and Josh’s firing was felt most keenly. Some piece of shit QAC made a joke about Josh that resulted in a Senior QA filing an official complaint. Yeah, Josh could be prickly but he was a friend and he tried to look after his team. You could get mad at him for occasionally being out of line, but you didn’t stay mad for long and you had his back because you knew he had yours.
I didn’t see much of Josh for awhile, he had moved into security by that time and so occasionally we would email back and forth — he would talk about his cat and ferret; then nothing for a while. I alighted on some multiplayer game that I wanted to get people together for and immediately thought of Josh and added him to a group email. He replied back not long after and we got to chatting a bit before he wrote:
“Look, probably not going to be able to play multi-player as I have just had a stroke.”
To his credit, his ability to make my eyes almost pop out of my head never failed.
I went to visit him in the hospital, bringing with me a couple of spare weights that he wanted to be able to train the side of his body impacted by the stroke. He spoke with a slur, as one part of his face had been heavily impacted, but he was lucid and in good spirits. He talked about how it felt like one minute he was fine and the next minute he was underwater, removed from the events around him. The situation didn’t feel real and he said that it was like they weren’t really happening to him, internally he was a little confused but otherwise serene and peaceful. Many years later my grandmother passed of a stroke and I repeated what he told me to my mother. It actually brought her a great deal of peace to know that my grandmother had not suffered.
It was funny seeing his family unite around him, his mom seemed to alternate between concern for him — chastising in a way that also expressed deep worry — and the fact that I’d left my coat on the hospital floor.
Josh bounced back and was as rambunctious as ever. He even referred to the stroke as the unlocking of his super power due to the reduced sensitivity in one side meaning he couldn’t feel pain.
I left Montreal again, but each time I came back I would arrange a meal/drinks and get the band back together. Traie and Josh would exchange barbs like no time had passed.
It was also good to hear that Josh had found the love of his life and was raising this adorable daughter that he clearly thought the world of. He always seemed so proud of his partner, and loved to talk about her expertise in the hospital she worked in. Of course he would joke that there was no way his daughter could be related to an old troll like him but that was just his way of showing his affection. His Facebook picture is still an image of his daughter.
That said, there would often be points where Josh and I would have Facebook Exchanges(tm). We stubbornly dug ourselves into certain topics and wouldn’t budge, but I was always thankful that we were able to talk about the important things in a gentlemanly fashion. Like how anti-vaxxers were fucking morons.
The second stroke, I think, was when it really started to worry me. Except he was still there picking fights on the internet. He wasn’t going to let reduced mobility stop him from telling people how horrifically wrong they were.
One of the last exchanges we had was, appropriately, about video games and was shot through with the same humour I’d known him for. It was tinged with maybe a little more self loathing than I was used to but I could still hear his voice in the words.
After that we just talked about old work knowledge — me talking about compliance on consoles — feeding him fuel so he could win another argument about CyberPunk 2077.
On September 1st 2022, I saw this on Facebook:
It’s official had a 3rd stroke:(
Such was the support for Josh in the comments, that even the General Manager who had been responsible for firing him was there offering words of encouragement. That struck me as fitting, you could only be mad at Josh for a little while.
There was a part of me that let that announcement sink in. Six short words and an emoji that popped some awful thoughts into the back of my head. However, I was travelling and overwhelmed with work and a number of other responsibilities that I didn’t reach out.
The reality came crashing down on the 19th of September 2022. I was told that Josh had passed and it was gutting. I started scrolling through old chats as a catharsis. My friend had picked one last fight he could not win.
Anyway, this has been long and rambling, much like one of Josh’s many stories. It is much too sad for a man who never let the world get him down for too long and I think he’d be pissed off with me for being such a sap.
I raise my non-alcoholic beer to you and admit two final points:
- Batman is a shit super hero
- It was pretty cool when they gave Spider-man the Iron man suit in that last film. Why didn’t they do that sooner?
