Paul David Novak

I was so sorry to hear of Paul's passing. I first met Paul in 1989, working in the same group at AT&T, and got to know him better when we started going to Pocket's Bar to play trivia. Tuesday’s there were an engineer’s wet dream, with $1 half-pound burgers and gigantic “Mug Club” beers for $2.25. (The servers made out pretty good too when they got their calculated-to-the-penny 15% tip:-) Paul’s bowling team and others met weekly for beers long after the real bowling league had disbanded. Paul would always ask, “Are you going bowling?” In 1999, Paul went to meet Sonja in person in Germany, but I was working there so we first met-up and went to Oktoberfest in Munich (Priorities:-) We took a cheap hotel room with no bathroom one train stop away from the fairgrounds. All the sponsored tents were fully booked, but since we went early, fairly empty. Paul said “Let’s just go in anyway”, so we just picked a table and sat down like we belonged there, figuring we could stay at least until being kicked out. As it turned out, we stayed the whole night, getting free beer, talking, singing, sometimes getting on the tabletop with a bunch of drunk Germans who never asked who we were and why no one actually knew us. I was so drunk, that after getting back to the hotel, I may have locked Paul out of the hotel room when he went to use the hall bathroom—and he ended up sleeping outside the door (my memory of the incident is a little fuzzy;-). Anyway, it was a blast. Paul was a good guy, who genuinely enjoyed meeting and learning about people. My friend Nancy from NYC, a developer, came out to trivia once, and she still remembers Paul very well. He recognized that she had a good mind (“Not a Bimbo”) and picked her brain about what she did and listened to her go into detail about algorithms and what not. For years, every once in a while, Paul would ask me, “Hey, how’s Nancy doing?” One year, I did a bike trip with Paul riding the Prairie Path from Warrenville to Oak Park to visit a friend. Once we hit Bellwood, the neighborhood got more dicey, and the bike path was strewn with broken glass. I came down with a flat, and was basically helpless in knowing how to fix it. Paul ended up doing it, pretty quickly, and never said anything to me about it. Back in 2005, I had surgery at Northwestern downtown, with about 4 days of recovery there.  I wasn’t expecting any visitors, but Paul showed up a couple of days in, the only visitor I had as it turned out. It takes a lot of time and effort to get downtown and back, so I always thought that said a lot about what kind of person Paul was. He was a good friend. I always liked Paul because he had a fun attitude with an offbeat sense of humor. I admired him because he knew what he wanted, went and got it, and always had a good time doing it. Paul didn't waste the time that he had. He knew how to live.