What a beginning to this week! :o( There was a technician who was absent on Friday. No one could make contact with him, and there was no evidence that he'd arrived at any of his assignments that day, so after a couple of hours, we started calling the customers on his route and rescheduling them. I helped with that... I jotted down the tech's number, looked up his route, and called whichever customers hadn't been contacted yet. Since he was slated for a vacation day on Saturday, there was some speculation that he'd also taken Friday off and we simply had incomplete information about his day off. If that were the case, it wouldn't be the first time something like that took place.

Well, this morning the news was broken that one of the techs, who was only 43 years old, took his own life over the weekend. His roommate found him on Friday night. I overheard a comment that made me wonder if this was the tech whose route I helped call off. I tracked down the tech number I'd jotted down, looked it up, and discovered that it WAS the same person. :o( Needless to say, it's pretty sad around here today. In particular, the router who handled the assignments for this tech is pretty upset. He went home sick about an hour and a half, MAYBE two hours, after he arrived at work and heard the news. He's in shock because he said that the tech was upbeat every time he spoke to him. He said that the tech even told him a few days ago he'd be off on Saturday but working Monday.

For that matter, no one else here had any inkling that anything was wrong. No one saw any warning signs or had any reason to believe that the tech was suicidal. I wish I knew ANY of these people well enough to tell them that I understand firsthand about depression and what damage it can do to a person's ability to think rationally. But I've overheard more than enough office gossip about other people, and I don't trust anyone here enough to share that information yet. If I can figure out a way to mention something without making myself into gossip fodder, I'll do it.

In the meantime, would anyone who reads this and says prayers please say some for the tech and his family and friends.