Finding bits of my past

As we have started the long and ongoing task of de-cluttering 20+ years of living in the same house we are starting to find things, such as this.

This would be, I think, a couple of years into my time at Apple, when I was in De Anza 7, which was the building I was in the day the Loma Prieta earthquake hit in 1989. This would have been shortly after I left Sun to help found the Direct Response center at Apple, which ultimately moved to Austin and ultimately became known as Applecare.

There’s a whole story about how that move happened, which involved at one point me declaring that my chair might go to Austin but I wouldn’t, which I found out much later got me written up with a formal reprimand in my HR file for bad attitude that my manager at the time neglected to inform me about, which, well, kind of sums up my manager at that time. Part of my bad attitude was probably because the rumors of the move hit just as I was about to go on a vacation, and my manager reassured me we were fine and not moving, and I came back after the time off to find out we in fact were, and my manager then told me they’d never told me we weren’t moving, and for some reason I kinda took that personal and all.

Which, in a way, sums up management in the Michael Spindler era. Fortunately, Apple survived (barely) despite him, because I sometimes wonder what our reality would look like today if Spindler hadn’t botched the sale of Apple to Sony, as well as the sale of Apple to Sun, and how today would be different if either of those had happened. Apple has influenced the evolution of our tech universe so much it’s hard to conceive of what it would look like if that hadn’t happened.

Would we all still be madly thumbing away on our Blackberries?