In 1997, the state of all things Apple looked bleak, which was why I defected to PowerComputing. That and my contract expiring as the Austin location was barely hiring despite all the attrition.
When I initially started with PCC, I felt like I had quit McDonald’s to work at Wendy’s but within weeks it had proved to be one of the smarter career moves I ever made. At Apple, I was just a temp who handled PowerBook calls adequately. At PCC, I had become a member of the elite Internal Help Desk Team which only had five members out of 60+ regular phone agents. Thanks to the experience gap and encouragement from my immediate boss Rob Fedson, my Mac OS and hardware troubleshooting skills blossomed. My knack for being generous with my coworkers through little gifts and cards hadn’t gone unnoticed neither. In January 1997, I was the inaugural recipient of the Team Spirit Award.
A quick digression regarding that Award. It was originally an old, broken golf trophy. One of the key conditions to receiving it was the winner being required to modify it before passing it on to another person who also exemplified great teamwork skills, like a chain letter. I was always proud of my modification: I glued on a lightsabre from one of my action figures to replace the golfer’s missing club. At the base of the figure, there was a Star Trek portable computer with a Windows logo pasted on the display. My friend Gretchen kindly burned a slash through it with her soldering iron to create the lightsabre’s damage. Finally, I had a banner on it saying “Use the Power.” I thought it was fitting since I received this on the day Star Wars was rereleased with that awful Greedo-shot-first scene.
Now back to the point of this entry…Things were going pretty well and on this day they got better when I was made the second recipient of the Presidential Excellence Award (the name may be incorrect) from President Joel Kocher. I earned it for my work with the outsource vendor 1-800-Service Partners (now called Harte Hanks). PowerComputing’s popularity had outpaced its technical support department so the company had turned to outsourcing for assistance, back when using India was impossible. Many of us were pissed when this began because we knew it was a huge factor in Apple’s decline. The executive caste tried to assuage us by saying that the OSVs (OutSource Vendors) would only handle the legacy/out of warranty customers. Then a nice lady named Kris Lawley tapped me for a special assignment: I couldn’t make the OSVs go away yet I could monitor them, document what they did well or poorly, and assist them. “Was this a punishment or a reward?” rolled through my mind. It definitely started out as a punishment because my first night of monitoring them in person was a jaw-dropping trainwreck to watch: As soon as these guys finished talking to a customer, they took another call and immediately put the next customer on hold to finish their notes of the previous call. Rather unacceptable under any circumstances.
Yours truly getting the award.
The hard work and critical assistance from Kris Lawley got the notice of Joel Kocher, the president of PCC. On this day in 1997, I was invited to a private dinner at Esther’s Follies down on Sixth Street. There was always a quarterly private dinner amongst the Sales team; there they’d hand out prizes for meeting their sales quotas. It was (and still is) a thrill to be handed the award from Kocher himself and hear him say “thank you, great job” personally. After the meal, the party moved next door to catch the evening show of Esther’s Follies with their topical jokes, magic tricks and a little audience participation from the Sales Manager, Mark Miller. I always had to make a mental double take on his name courtesy of the losers from GDW.
Sales Manager Miller getting to dance on stage
I had definitely arrived at PowerComputing. The job I took only months before to pay the bills had transformed into a decent career with a pretty optimistic future. Thanks to Rob Fedson, Doug Reed, Kris Lawley and some really encouraging co-workers, I had left Apple as an ugly duckling and transformed into a swan with PowerComputing. I know it sounds corny, but it was better than the butterfly metaphor.
Joel Kocher was a fiery figure but I always thought he was the right man for the job.
After I returned to Apple in 1998 and I kept the award in my cubicle. I also made sure it was mentioned in my resume. There was still some bad blood from certain people in Apple over us Power folks “weaseling” back into the company. As the years passed, this award has sadly faded in importance with career and I took it home during the Building Six move. It’s somewhere in the garage and I think it broke off of its stand. I’m going to go hunt it down in the near future (when three other immediate crises are resolved), clean it up, get it repaired and maybe display it in my office. It’ll inspire my plans for the near future.
