Pre Apple Part 1

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 rejuveness. This small company was growing so fast that they went from a call center of 2 people to over 100 working around the clock. With that growth came more ad work for us and I had billboards in time square and full page ads in cosmo, vogue and the like. it was common for me to try to impress my friends by grabbing a random copy and thumbing through to my ad. I figured this would be a common thing for me as a young graphic designer. Not so fast, their growth slowed and over time the novelty of digital printing and digital photography wore off and we were rendered to being a regular design shop. The good news is it freed me up to take on other projects. I started doing websites for DeBeers lacrosse among others things, and the Macinchat Variety Show which was pretty much the first "podcast" ever. Well before there was podcast, we were just too young and dumb to really make much out of it. It was a silly show that revolved around Apple. We did product reviews, fake phone calls, fake commercials and general chatting about the Apple universe. It was also, this time, I took over as the lead contact for the Digital Guild arm of the graphic artist guild here in Albany. I printed a newsletter and created a website and started training these graphic designers on how to use the very programs and computers that had. The transition to physical design to digital was happening at a rapid pace and I was leaned on as a young designer who knew computers and I was very busy with being called upon via phone, email, and even AOL IM. What does this have to do with Apple?

It's interesting to remember the events that led up to me getting hired at Apple. While today's standards seem to be much higher than they were in 2001, Apple was also still very picky, and the interview process was still challenging. So here we are in upstate NY and we didn't believe we would see an Apple store here for years. NYC, Boston and the like really should have had an Apple store before us. Enter the Macinchat show, we routinely did some prank calls, so we decided to call some of the local mall stores like Yankee candle and pretend we were asking about the new Apple store that was coming to Albany. After calling a couple and not getting any bites we called Bath and Bodyworks where the manager answers the phone and to our utter surprise, she said she had gotten a call from someone at Apple about a manager position. The call which was supposed to be funny took at a turn and became very serious. We started hammering her on the details which she had little. So we began calling and calling pretty much every store and sure enough we got some others sites. Apple was coming to Albany. At that moment we went on the Apple site and applied for every position. EVERY position.