Pre Apple part 2

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 have some acumen, when my employer upgraded our digital printer to a newer Xerox printer that came with a stand alone RIP that ran on Scitex, I got my hands dirty keeping that thing running. Unix is a strange beast and the Scitex version of it was ugly! However, it was powerful and at the time 1998-99, it was doing stuff no other operating system could for the printing industry. Xerox took notice when I figured out how to get their variable data software "Darwin" to work with with the printer. For a few months, I was flown out on a corporate jet to Rochester NY to work with the developer of Darwin, a guy from Israel who made the software ( a plugin for Quark xPress). The funny thing has he developed it but never actually used it! It was a great idea, you could print out unique documents one after the next with the info supplied by a CSV file. Your postcard would say "Fred your dream vacation awaits" and there would be a photo that of Fred and then the border would be blue because that's Fred's favorite color and maybe a picture of the Eiffel Tower because Fred likes France. The next postcard said "Sally your dream vacation awaits" with all of Sally's favorite colors, photos etc. I don't quite remember the type of printer that we tested it on we had a DCS 40 but this was some big printer that used a roll of paper. It was pretty cool technology and the guy who made it loved seeing it in action. Sadly it never took off for us and in the late 90's it was a hard sell to companies. Today, it's commonplace. What was cool about that was going through the trouble shooting process and testing of the workflow and software. It got to the point that I started doing the routine maintenance on the printer itself I could nearly field strip the machine down.

As you notice I will go off on a tangent as things come back to me. You will also know I'm not a trained writer and my spelling and grammar won't win me any awards. So where were we? Oh, yes I got a call! It was late August and I received a call from Apple! In hindsight, it wasn't Apple it was a recruiter for Apple. Apparently, they never got my resume or my application. This was weird as I referenced several things on my resume to a resounding "No I was not aware of that". It never clicked with me at the time. Apparently, they got my name from someone from the Graphic Artist Guild who told them I was "THE Mac guy". That was entirely false as my friend who started with me and co-hosted the Macinchat Radio show, was the actual "Mac guy". So I was in some sort of Head hunter database and things started to move fast.