Access granted.
One of this early memories was the idea of access. I can imagine that when the retail team looked at the roles of "genius" they held us in high regard. In fact, they held the entire retail teams in high regard. With that said we found we had access to just about… everything. We quickly learned that there were servers all over the place with all kinds of stuff on them. Software, Music, Video and PDF manuals of pretty hight level stuff. We could download a nightly build of 10.1
A bit more about training
As you could imagine, training was just as you would expect. Classroom and leader led. Jim would sit in front of the class with a projector behind him and we would go through various training scenarios. A big one was the troubleshooting theory. This, as far as I can remember, has not changed all that much. One such theory is something called a split half search. Essentially breaking down the problem, in half, to find the solution. Another such methodology are to use componen
First day of actual training. Well not really.
Now fully badged we are ready to roam the campus, not so fast. We are instantly ushered from 1 Infinite loop, off-campus down to Bubb Road. What the hell! We thought we were going to rubbing elbows with Phil "Pentium toaster" Schiller and Mr. Jobs himself. Not in some dank office building on "Bubb" road. It sounds like a noise you make after eating too many tacos. So here we are miles from the mother ship to train how to be a genius. At this moment we all realized collective
Getting a badge and seeing Steve Jobs
After getting clapped in and there were the obligatory "we are so happy you are here!" speeches we are ushered across the lobby in 1 Infinite loop to get a badge. Everyone who goes on campus and is an employee has to get a badge. Apparently, Apple was a bit ahead of the curve here and had some fun with it. Essentially the process was, as a new employee, pick an email, wait to get your photo taken, then a badge was created with your photo. Then you could roam the campus. We ha
The first day!
As you can imagine a great time was had by all and we knew we had to get to 1 Infinite Loop in the am, 9am. We didn't get to bed till after 10pm. So it was over 20 hours and about that many beers, but we were all awake and ready to start. We arrived and parked in a unassuming parking spot and headed into the campus. We had to show something to the folks at the front desk but it was pretty easy to get in. We were ushered into a hallway to the right of the main desk. We waited
Off to Cupertino, arriving.
Flying to California from Albany NY needs a layover of course. We stopped into Chicago and made the next leg to San Jose. No issues and for a long flight it wants bad. Getting into California was a bit surreal, lots of mountains and not a lot of trees. Rolling hills of sand and if I remember correctly they were starting to have another drought, and it showed. We got out rental car, something unremarkable, we were off to Oakwood apartments which was exactly 9 minutes from 1 In
