Death and Taxes

Vaughn helped people with their taxes.  He seemed to enjoy the nuisances of tax laws, relish in his ability to help people, and savor the once a year opportunity to help Art.  In the winter of 1985, on Fox Street, I was staying with Vaughn and working as the computer guy for an environmental company in Portland.  Vaughn had a PC with tax software on it that he used for his clients.  I discovered a floppy disk a technician had left at my office with numerous obscurely named files on it.  It didn’t seem right to test out the programs at work so I waited until I got home.  I inserted the disk into Vaughn’s computer and began to experiment with the files. They turned out to be a series of low level diagnostic tools. I eventually clicked on a file named simple wf.exe.  Moments later, I turned white and my stomach dropped to my ankles as I realized I was formatting Vaughn’s hard drive, destroying all of Vaughn’s client records. 

Later that evening Vaughn came home.  You might think he’d be angry, he wasn’t.  You might think he would call me stupid, he never would do that.  Vaughn always encouraged me. He always tried bolstered my self-esteem.  Instead, he said it was no big deal. He had a backup.  I know it was still a big deal; he just kept it to himself.