Sandy Colombo had been a mid-level manager in my division at the University of Michigan. She had been around for a very long time. I barely knew her, but I had heard enough stories about her to know that there was tension between her and some of the people in the group she managed.

I was shocked when she was suddenly relieved of the command of her group, and when the revered technical lead in our group was given her position. It did not surprise me that some action had been taken, but the form of the action was unsettling.

I hear very little first-hand talk about things like this, so all I heard were second- or third-hand reports of how people reacted to this. My overall impression was that it had been a good move to install someone else in her position because of the unfavorable relations between her group and campus, and between her group and the rest of our division. I had heard that many many people found her group difficult to work with, including people in our group.

She was moved onto her own project, which was to do something which I was told that she would be good at. The installation of our technical lead, Gavin, into her group was meant to be a temporary six-month maneuver. After six months, he might or might not return to us. There was a certain amount of upset within our group that we were losing him. I had immediately reacted to the news as if it were good, because I felt that the group Gavin would be heading could really use someone like him, and he'd been so busy for that last six months or more that I'd really lost touch with him, I would not feel like much had changed.

The only other things I knew about Sandy were that she had had a serious skiing accident a few years ago, and had been in a cast and on crutches for almost a year. After that, she never walked normally. I also knew that her ex-husband had died in a bicycling accident.

Next: Learning of Her Death

Table of Contents: The Death and Mourning of Sandy Colombo