Assholes, Steve Jobs and the Smiley Face Mac

Because I don’t preplan my Sacramento real estate blogs and write fresh every morning, yesterday was the first day in almost a decade that I did not write a blog, and you know what –no kickback about it, no consequences and nobody cared. That shows how significant my words in a daily blog are — nobody gives a crap. This real estate agent could have dropped dead, and someday will, and the first clue will be no blog that day.

The problem began when I slept in and therefore overslept. Then my phone started ringing at 7:30 AM and did not stop all day. I recharged it twice. I’m up late most nights reading Steve Jobs, the biography by Walter Isaacson. It’s such an enthralling book and not because Jobs was an asshole. I deal with enough of those types in real estate, and Jobs was a level above those guys because he’s also had charisma on top of being a genius. He got kicked out and rose again, like a Phoenix. Most real assholes I run into through my business are assholes to the core, simple guys, but Jobs seemed more complex. Like his asshole-ness was so completely integrated into his personality that it was more easily forgiven.

But I’m not reading the book because I’m fascinated by Steve Jobs; I’m reading it because I have been an Apple customer for more than 25 years, and it’s like reading my own history.

Ah, with fond memories I recall the Macintosh, the PowerMac, and the G3. Some of them are sitting in my garage. I can’t bear to destroy or wipe the hard drives, so I can’t give them away. The will probably sit in my garage until they rust. They are relics already. They will never turn into an antique. Even now I smile thinking about the days of a smiley Mac face and how that image appearing on my computer monitor meant everything was all right with the world. No frowny faces. Plus, one can always depend on a Mac. You can’t say that about Windows.

Between house renovations and in the midst of my real estate endeavors in the 1990s, I worked on the side for a few years as a communications director at a nonprofit in Minnesota for the second largest industry in Minnesota: printing. I outfitted that nonprofit with Macs. Networked the computers myself. Signed up all of the employees for AOL. Even when the president who is now long dead subscribed to DSL (to track internet activity, among other reasons), I still kept a modem under my desk and used it with muted sound for personal activities.

Today, I own iPads, an iPod, iShuffle, iPhone, a desktop Power Mac, a PowerBook with state-of-the-hard drive drive, and I’m an iTunes customer. Do you know that Apple does not make its own product to transfer music between all of your devices and one has to pay a third-party vendor for that service? This is what happens when Steve Job dies.