The tale has been told time and again, but there I was, sitting outside at Cafe Du Monde on a gray December morning in 1996, waiting on a plate of beignets and sipping on some cafe au lait, and I looked at the USA Today business section. They were announcing that Apple was acquiring NeXT for $400 million and that Steve Jobs would be returning as a special assistant to the CEO. I wasn’t a technology professional at all – I was a grad student in political science – but I’d been a Mac user for two and a half years, and I was well-familiar with the constant doom-talk around Apple Computer. And I said to myself, “well, this is it, we’re going to live or die on this one.”
I got word of the resignation today on Twitter, while sat in front of a MacBook Pro and an iMac, working on setting up the new deployment solution for imaging machines with Lion. Since September 1997, every nickel I’ve earned has been, in some measure, a product of working with Apple products. Four jobs on two coasts, fourteen years next month – in a career that I fell into because I spent three years noodling around with my Power Mac 6100, squeezing that extra 20K out of the system heap and paring the excess out of the System Folder.
Apple made a computer that anyone could use. They made a computer that a lone dork could teach himself how to support without a lick of actual training or instruction, enough to pass an interview and get hired for workstation support. That was Steve’s first tour of duty. His second one was saving the company and making it viable enough that “Apple specialist” has paid my freight for a decade and half with no signs of slowing down.
And when I moved out here with no job and no immediate prospects, within three weeks I was working…at Apple. Where I did get the formal training, and a 401(k), and stock that tripled in value by the time I sold it, and a company discount on buying my car and on my cell service, both of which I still rely on.
So yeah. When I plummeted out of academia and nearly to my death, there were a lot of people who held the net. But when you get right down to it, that net was manufactured by Steve Jobs.
And yeah, I’m grateful.