SoosMac

I got an email from Apple travel with my itinerary for my trip. This would be the farthest I have ever flown, Albany to San Jose. We had a layover in Chicago as I remember, before that I had been as far as St. Louis. So again, we are in 2001 and I'm getting ready to go. I have my Powerbook Titanium, yes with a handle, loaded with OS 10 Public beta. OSX 10.1 was $129 and bit torrent has not yet been invented. This baby was dual booting to OS9 because as a graphic designer I ne

It's no surprise I took the offer and went to work for Apple. I know it was a rollercoaster ride of a story, an edge of your seat kinda thing but really if I didn't, this blog would be DUMB. Maybe it felt like a cliffhanger but not really, right? It was a good couple of weeks to get to this point but once I accepted it became fast and furious. Flights were booked, classes scheduled and even things mailed to me. A nice box with a t-shirt that said, "the journey is the reward"

After going back and forth with friends I decided I would decline any offer. I had a degree in graphic design and I was pretty good at it. Fooling around with Mac's didn't make me a genius anymore then being really good at finger painting makes you a great artist. As I waited, and waited, and waited to get an offer call I schemed up a plan. This was late July in 2001 and I was fairly busy with my design work and digging deep into GoLive Cyberstudio and really learning this pr

The interview with Steve went on longer than most, its safe to say we had several minutes together more than the others. How long I don't recall. I do remember him telling me that I would be one of the genii hired if I accepted the offer. So not that fast. Apple had this gatekeeper model during hiring. Get through the headhunter….check. Get through the tech guy,…check Get through the physical interview, …check. Get offered... Funny thing is I never thought I would get t

It was a long day, I don't remember when I got my turn to go into the conference room but it had to have been hours. Starting around 9 am they started to take people into the room and interviewing them. One by one they went in and left. What was amazing was the efficiency of the process, they would call your name, you go in and invariably that person would be out in minutes. At the time it didn't occur to me that this was actually a bad thing. Some of these people interviewin

Like I said before I finally got a call. It was a woman who asked me some very basic questions about my Mac knowledge, which at the time, was pretty good. Most of the questions were pretty softball in nature, nothing hard hitting like "If you were a frog what color would be the sound you would make, and why"? Yes that was a real interview question I was asked by another company, but I digress. On the phone with this person it was unclear that they were representing Apple and

After applying to every position on Apple's website, nothing. Not a single email, call or anything. This was maybe June of 2001 I gave up hope and decided that I wasn't going to be an Apple employee. It makes sense, I had no real technical background, I was a graphic designer, not a computer nerd. I had some good Mac experience and worked as an Apple fanboy going to CompUSA to clean up the Apple section on my free Saturdays that's about it. When it came to tech stuff I did ha

How did I get to Apple in the first place? That's a good question and funny how it turned out. I was working as an Art Director in a local graphic design studio. We specialized in graphic design, digital printing, and digital photography. We estimated that we may have been the first shop like this on the east coast. We had some major accounts like GE and West Point. Over the years I had my work in major publications due to the explosive growth of this small company called re