So, I'm sitting in my car, creeping down Leesburg Pike trying to get home from an ill-timed after-work errand to Tysons Corner Center in the rain, listening to "Marketplace," to a story about the marketing of Coca-Cola. And I hear a name that I haven't heard in 25 years: Joel Steckel. I went to graduate school with him, but we weren't that close, so I lost track of him after graduation. I always figured that he'd gone into a corporate job, as most of us did.

It turns out that Joel stayed in academia, and he is now the chair of the marketing department at New York University. "Marketplace" gave him a one- or two-sentence sound bite, but it was enough to recognize a voice from long ago. He looks good in his NYU headshot, too: I think he's got more hair than he had in B-school.

Joel used to say that happiness was writing with a sharp pencil.

posted: 7:47:49 PM