Craig Priest

Craig was really the technical genius behind Lavalife's IVR products. He was Ed's sidekick. Craig was the guy who made it happen. He grasped the concepts and turned them into reality.

Before George Liatsidis and I were hired, there was just Craig. For years, he was a one man show. He did everything, building servers, IVR nodes, telecommunications, programming and the dreaded 24/7 support. He was the technical God. There was basically nothing he did not know. To illustrate the point, I was trying to figure out what terminators went where on an old SCSI drive. This is back in the days when SCSI drives were the size of bricks, holding an amazing 40MB and where there were at least a dozen terminators. He knew exactly where the terminators went without the manual. You may be thinking he memorized everything which is true but we were using at least 3 brands of drives.

I had worked with Craig for at least 5 years. There are two words that sum up Craig's passion, thirst for knowledge and skill, Generalizing Specialist!. He's still is my technical mentor. He taught me everything I know about IVR systems, telecommunications and Netware. Here's a summary of what I learned:

• How to crimp coax cable!
• Build a PC from scratch and to troubleshoot hardware and software problems - especially port conflicts
• Install, configure and troubleshoot Dialogic card problems
• Install, configure and troubleshoot Network problems
• Optimizing memory
• Troubleshoot telephony problems
• Converting and editing voice files. I really sucked at that. There weren't any fancy GUI tools. All you had was a tape reel machine, head phones and a good old DOS program.

It's always easy to install stuff but if you don't know how to fix things when they go bump in the night then what good are you. I had taken this knowledge for granted. The ability to be able to methodically troubleshoot seems to be a dying art. You've heard this phrase in the corporate world, "I'll send it back and order you a new PC". Meanwhile, the tech had only spent 10 minutes basically guessing what was wrong.

Even to this day, I personally choose every component that goes into my PC's. I don't build PC's or servers anymore. No time.

The fundamentals that Craig gave me, provided the foundation from which I used to architect, design, develop and implement the web infrastructure for questpersonals.com. I was able to do it all by my lonesome! This obviously saved the company major bucks. Questpersonals.com was taken over by to one of FMG's other companies a couple of years back.

Craig has worked with all of Dialogic's IVR boards, from the D40, AMX, LSI/120, D121, DMX to the D240SC's. Basically anyone who wanted to learn, he would teach. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I for one will always be forever grateful. I know Sandra Carmody and Minh Co are as well.

He epitomized IMG and it's culture, i.e. smart, grounded, team player, working to all hours of the day, night and weekends to boot. Hopefully, someday I can find someone so easy to work with. He did what many directors or managers don't do. He gave me the freedom, responsibility and authority to do my job. The point is he entrusted in me once I proved myself. When I was hiring people, I used Craig as the model.

The early days were no cake walk. It was sheer blood and sweat. That's how I felt. I can imagine how Craig felt. Craig, you can proud of what you built even though you never received your financial props. I can promise you this. I will be there to set the record straight when the "fairy tale" stories come out about who started or who was responsible for IMG's success.

Craig, like Ed has refocused his priorities onto his family. He does consulting for Bell Northern Research and other companies. All that matters is he's having more fun and doing things he enjoys.

Craig, thanks for hiring me and for the opportunity of working with you.

Some 5 years later, we hooked up again. But that's another story for another time.

Yep, he was ONLY NINE in this video. His YouTube profile name is humbucker97. He may have to give up some of his anonymity once he gets some gigs. I wish I could be a rock star ;)

It's great to see he's picking up his dad's love for the guitar!!!