A tribute to Ben Corser – the man, the legend

Last week we learned the awful news that our fantastic associate Ben Corser was tragically killed in a shooting incident in Mexico. To say we are gutted is an understatement, and our thoughts are very much with his family and all who had the privilege of working with Ben.

We wanted to share some of the outstanding memories of those EE people who knew Ben best.

A unique and brilliant character

Lucille worked with Ben at HMRC CIP and describes him as a brilliant engineer. She says:Ben was a joy to work with, and totally unique. Ben combined his brilliant creativity and engineering in a very unique way, and he definitely gave the coolest presentations with his beautiful hand-drawn illustrations. Ben’s smile and enthusiasm was infectious and he became a legend in CIP after his performance as the Austrian ambassador “His excellency” at the Christmas party murder-mystery :-)Unfortunately, as Ben and I both joined HMRC during the pandemic we never met in person. But we had lots of chats on video calls where we would talk about anything and everything which was always interesting and a lot of fun. I knew how much Ben cared about the environment, his love for skateboarding and how much he adored his niece.Ben had a beautiful, gentle soul and I feel privileged that I knew him, even though it was only for a short period. My deepest condolences to his family for the loss of their beloved son, brother and uncle.

Ben’s talent as an actor didn’t go unnoticed by Julia either. She told us: When we had a remote murder mystery party for Christmas Ben played a very silly character and took it seriously. It made the whole party and everyone was crying from laughter at how good he was. He was an asset to any team.

Making code entertaining

Ben was well-known as an exceptional engineer, and Chris wanted to point out that Ben was not just a great coder, but an entertaining one too: this line of code says a lot about Ben and his happy go lucky character:

raise Exception('Hey, dude! There is no .terraform-version in this tree')

And this one too

from pathlib import Path

def get_tf_version(environment: str, tf_path: Path) -> str:

    raise NotImplementedError('Everything is idiosyncratic')

def prepare(environment: str, tf_path: Path) -> Path:

    raise NotImplementedError('Everything is idiosyncratic')

A free spirit and an inspiration

There’s a theme when you talk to people at Equal Experts about Ben. Phrases like “one of the most helpful people”, “a good guy to work with”, and “fun and easy to talk to” are common. But it’s clear that Ben was just different, in such a good way. Which makes his loss all the more difficult to comprehend.

Here’s what Martin had to say:Ben is one of those rare treasures that have been taken from us too soon. He was a true free spirit, whose love of life and knowledge are an inspiration for others. His loss has left the world dimmer.

JP also wanted everyone to know just how much there was to Ben’s personality:Working with Ben was a lot of fun. The more I got to know him, the more I realised what a fascinating person he was. He would regale us with stories about skateboarding, art and his love of mathematics, always with a smile, never taking himself too seriously. It’s not often you meet someone like him. He genuinely cared about doing the right thing, and trod his own path. He was one of the good guys.

We will all miss Ben

Chris’s tribute echoes the sentiment of everyone who knew Ben:I had the absolute pleasure of working with Ben at HMRC for only a few short months, but in that time his exceptional talent, creativity and humour shone through. He brought a unique combination of expertise and fun to the team (and wider department) and after reading the many words that have been written elsewhere I can see that this spirit was not limited to his work life. Ben’s passing is a profound loss, not only for those he knew and loved him, but most definitely those he had yet to meet. We’ll miss you Ben.

Always a pleasure

As a final summary, it seems fitting to end with this letter to Ben from Kayhan:

Ben,Although we never met in person, the year we spent working together through the pandemic was one I will never forget. I’ll never forget it because it was working with you. The time that you amazed our whole team with that class (Swedish?!) accent during our Covid party, trying to code with you whilst you were on the rocks with seagulls in the background, or your makeshift antenna because you couldn’t get a decent signal in Cornwall. Thinking about those times always makes me smile.Your drive to always do the right thing – you were always more than happy to get stuck into difficult tasks – set you above others.You were one of a kind. Fun, ambitious, talented and best of all a super nice guy.Our time knowing each other was brief, and I am gutted that I didn’t get to know you more. But the time that anyone got to know you, they remembered you.Catch you one day man, but in the meantime you keep riding those waves and skating on that board.
Kayhan