My brother and I built an air compressor.
Not a little one for filling bike tires. A ridiculous industrial machine with several huge cast-metal housings spread across a cart.
The photos are from 2003. They showed up in my inbox again today with a short family note about good times. David and I are standing behind the machine, both smiling. He is my little brother, although the picture is starting to make “little” feel inaccurate.
Several more compressor pieces are sitting on the floor behind us, so the cart is not even the entire project.
I immediately forwarded the photos.
My caption was simple:
Me and my little brother building an air compressor.
The room is a real machine shop. Someone at my new job did not believe that I had actually lived in one, so I used the same photo as evidence.
My room was about thirty-five feet north of where we were standing.
Again, not figuratively. I lived in the building. The machine shop was right there.
Now I spend most of my day around racks, switches, storage systems, virtual machines, and data centers. In this photo the parts are heavier and the floor is dirtier, but it does not look like a strange place to me.
There is probably a much larger story in how I got from molecular biology, industrial equipment, and an unfinished degree into technology. I am not going to solve that from one old photo.
Today it is enough that the photo exists.
Two brothers, one enormous air compressor, and my bedroom thirty-five feet away.