Many of you who know me well know Issie as the “Snoring Spaniel”. She spent her later years in my den while I was working, including when I was on conference calls. Her snoring always lightened up the mood of a meeting.

Many more of you know her from her famous “Out of Office” messages when I was traveling for New Relic. If you sent me an internal email during the 80% of the time I was traveling, you’d get an email reply from Issie talking about where her dad was this week:

“My dad is off again…someplace he calls Spain. I don’t know why he couldn’t take me with him, but he never does. I’ll just sit here waiting for him to get back.”

She was a loving, caring dog. She was an old doggie, nearly 150,000 years old. She joined our family not long after I started working at Amazon (this was back before AWS and “cloud computing” even existed). She was in the room during the writing of four books, and some hundreds of articles and presentations.

I don’t know if all dogs go to heaven, but Issie certainly will.