My Friend John Wick

I first met Craig in the heyday of the dotcom boom. I interviewed him for a PR position at the high-tech startup where I was marketing director, and we became fast friends. 

I hired him on the spot.

In return, he invited me for dinner that night at La Barca in the Marina District of San Francisco with his roommates to celebrate. We drank pitchers of margaritas followed by many bottles of beer, and there was probably some food in there too. We were young and stayed up all night carousing around the bars of the city and playing cards back at his apartment once they closed.

Craig lives in LA now. He has a two-year-old daughter, a baby mama who's a bit of a nightmare, and is lately under a tremendous amount of pressure at his job.

The company is in free fall, and the new executive leadership is taking a slash-and-burn approach in a desperate attempt to turn things around.

Several directors have recently left, voluntarily, including his boss -- who was handpicked and placed in the position by the new Pol Pot-like CEO.

Craig is still standing, and his friends and longtime colleagues have started calling him John Wick: he just cannot be killed.

If you haven't been blessed with a viewing of the John Wick franchise, John Wick is a hit man who picks up his craft again after a gangster thug kills his puppy -- which was given to John by his recently deceased wife.

There are lots of bullets resulting in lots of deaths. John Wick's isn't one of them.

Not long after I hired Craig, he started training for his third or fourth triathlon. Craig is competitive, and he adopted one of the high intensity training programs that were trending at the time. I partnered up with him for support and quit after one session. It nearly killed me. It was beyond intense and to continue would have been masochistic. Craig kept going.

A few days later, I insisted he stop, too.

After his fourth workout, Craig trudged into the office, grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down at his desk, positioned right next to mine at a 90-degree angle. I turned to him with a bit of urgency to talk about the press release we were on deadline for that afternoon.

He swiveled his chair around with his coffee cup in hand, holding it at a tilt that was not quite upright. I remember some of the coffee spilling out, but that may be my memory playing hyperbolic tricks on me. His eyes were swimming in his head. I mean, swimming. The medical term for it is a disconjugate gaze. His eyes operated independently of one another, and seemingly independent of whatever Craig had in mind for them as well.

So there's something about Craig that's different. The guy is tough. The guy won't die. The guy won’t die. He hangs in there, even in situations others deem unbearable. He also didn't do that well in the triathlon.

Of course, it's time for him to get out. But there's that puppy. There's something about his situation that's telling him it's not quite time. He has more work to do, even if it's revenge for the terrible treatment he's enduring that became insufferable for his colleagues.

I both admire him for that and shake my head at him. It's not the approach I would take. But, then again, I'm no John Wick.