Dan Rosenberg
I’ve stayed in touch with Matt since we first met at Syracuse University, in the early seventies. He grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. Matt now lives in Cleveland, where he has resided for many years, raising three daughters with his wife, Nancy. As many of you regular readers know, I was raised in Cincinnati, about 250 miles southwest of Cleveland on I-71.
Not long after I moved to New Jersey to work for a subsidiary of Cincinnati Bell in Piscataway, I hired George, who resided in Morristown at that time. In 1990, he transferred to Cincinnati to work for another Cincinnati Bell company. While George and I have lived briefly in other places since then, we have essentially changed places. George left Cincinnati Bell in 2006 to work for a up and coming company, also in Cincinnati, Total Quality Logistics, better known as TQL, now the second largest freight brokerage firm in the United States. Like Matt, I’ve stayed in touch with George over the years.
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You’ve probably guessed that my former roommate in New York and my former employee in New Jersey are connected. Here’s how!
A few years ago, my wife, Abby, and I attended the wedding of Matt’s daughter Lauren, in Brooklyn. While we had seen Matt and Nancy on their visits to New York City, we had not seen Lauren’s sisters, Julia and Shannon, since their family visit to our home in Warren, about ten years ago.
At the wedding reception, we met Julia’s fiancé, Kevin, who grew up in Cincinnati. We learned that they planned to live in Columbus, about halfway between Cleveland and Cincinnati. Due to the global pandemic, Julia and Kevin were married in a private ceremony. We hope to attend the reception, which was postponed a year.
This past February I called Matt as I thought he might be able to help me with a project I was working on. At one point in the conversation, Matt said to me, “I’m not sure I told you that Julia and Kevin moved to Cincinnati. Julia just took a job in corporate communications with a company called TQL.”
I responded, “She might run into a good friend mine. His name is George. He is the Chief Information Officer at TQL with over three hundred people reporting to him. He just announced his retirement, so I am not sure when he is leaving. I hired George many years ago in New Jersey.”
My call with Matt ended. Fifteen minutes later, I received a text message from Matt that he checked in with Julia and she had a meeting scheduled with George the next day.
I leave it to you to determine if it is a random connection that… I just happened be talking to my college roommate, his daughter recently moved to Cincinnati, takes a new job, and has a meeting on her calendar with George, who I hired in New Jersey over thirty years ago.