CP2

Chris P or CP2 is one of the sharpest men I have ever known. The son of Italian immigrants he was raised in Port Melbourne and then lived in the eastern suburbs in Surrey Hills not far from Mark and I in Camberwell.

When Mark and I got back from overseas in our late 20s I got a job at Monash Uni working on the student systems support team. I didn't actually have any true IT talent but I'd had some experience creating and using a database, a small amount of time overseas working for Realtek (a hugely successful Scottish startup) and had just started studying my Grad Dip in Computing at RMIT plus I had an awesome reference from Peter and some written ones (those were the days!) from La Trobe university.

Chris wasn't in our team, I can't even remember the name of the team he worked on but it was nested in amongst Finance and he was responsible for setting the exam timetabling for all of the students at Monash Uni and making sure there were no clashes across all campuses. He was a gun at Excel. I shudder to think of all the complex code that produced a perfect timetable.

He was also, across the board, a genius, very, very clever with words. There would be funny emails going around and one time he made signs and stuck them on our cube farms. They were all plays on our names so my dear colleague opposite me had a sign posted on her desk wall called "Come In You" when her name was "Cami Nheu". He loved Greek culture. His son had starred in a Greek film and the family had been to Greece. In his back yard he built a garden walk of Greek curios, kind of like a Seven Wonders of Greece tour, including a mock up of the Acropolis which his son renamed "The Acrapolis". So kitsch it reminded me of Jacques Tati's films.

Being a lover of Greek culture, he also adored Irini, my Greek colleague. Those two were always rubbishing each other. Irini gave him so much stick about a red tie Chris work regularly. When we had get togethers, it was always guaranteed mirth whether it was in Surrey Hills, Eildon when Mark and I moved, Cranbourne where he and his wife bought a farmlet or Horsham when they trekked across with their caravan.