There is no irreplaceable man

This poem is displayed on a bronze plaque attached to a building at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Henrietta New York. I don’t remember the author name.

As a general rule I hate poetry, but this is a great poem; it rhymes real good:


Sometime when you’re feeling important,
Sometime when your ego’sin bloom,
Sometime when you take it for granted,
You’re the best qualified man in the room.
Sometime when you think that your passing
Will leave an unfillable hole,
Just remember this simple example,
And see how it humbles your soul.

Take a bucket and fill it with water,
Put your hand in up to your wrists,
The hole that you make when you leave it,
Is the measure of how much you’ll be missed.
You may thrash all you want when you enter,
You may stir up the waters galore,
But just wait for a moment
And it is still the same as before.

The moral of this is quite simple,
Just do the best that you can.
But please always remember
There is no irreplaceable man

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Reader feedback:

Mr. Burleson,

I'm curious about your latest blog post, in which you transcribed a poem that's posted on a building at RIT. Several of my friends and I graduated from RIT just yesterday. Many of us took courses in database, and since our department focuses its attention primarily on the Oracle DBMS, we found the information you've posted on your websites to be indispensable. One might say that you've become a cult hero of the RIT IT department. We've paid many tributes, in the form of a giant poster on the wall of a lab, an April Fool's Day prank, and a web search tool targeted only at your sites (to filter out all the other crap).

I subscribed to your blog a few weeks ago when one of my friends described it as quite entertaining. You can imagine my surprise when I read the first line of your latest post! I noticed something else about your history while trying to locate your email address. None of us was aware that you spent a significant period of your professional career in Rochester. So, my question for you is: have you visited RIT recently, or is the poem something that you recall from when you were in the area previously?

Thanks for all the help you've given us along the way, and for the continued quality of the content you post to your blog.

Zack

>> So, my question for you is: have you visited RIT recently, or is the poem something that you recall from when you were in the area previously?

Before your time (late 1980's), I taught the graduate school introduction to IT course at RIT, and I remembered this great poem from the plaque on the business school building!