Thanks to my love of amazingly well-designed tools, the first word that comes to mind for me when I think of the letter A is Apple.
I have written before, coyly, on my older blog, about working in the Apple Assurance Center in Austin, TX and the tiny role I played in the launch of the iMac, but I was silent about why I left. I’ve told this story to friends but never committed it to the internet. It may be of interest only to me.
I think, after 11 years, the statute of limitations has long since run out on the NDA and non-compete I probably signed when I took my job for Apple, and that probably also counts for the story of how I ended up leaving.
I had moved to Austin to try to get a full-time, white badge job at Apple Computer. I was a contractor, a blue badge, allowed to work on behalf of the company but not given all the prerequisites and privileges. And I was struggling. My job wasn’t technical support; I didn’t help people troubleshoot and reinstall software. My job was to talk to the people who wanted to complain. The customers who had gotten a bad experience, or had had to endure one too many breakdowns and repairs, the ones who had a beef against the company.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but Apple customers are the most passionate and loyal in the industry. They were (and still largely are) creative, imaginative, clever people. People who don’t necessarily pride themselves on following rules or patiently going along with the flow. And when those folks get mad about something… brother, do they get mad. These were the folks on the other end of my phone, 10 to 15 times a day or more, five days a week.
Dammit, I was good at my job, too. My co-workers and managers all recognized it. I was calm and soothing. I was firm when I knew someone was being unreasonable. I was empathetic when someone had suffered enough. More than once I had someone thank me just for listening to their story. My voice was praised as being worthy of the radio.
We had guidelines to follow in what we could offer them. If they were just barely outside of warranty, we could give them an exception and get a repair made. We could offer a year of AppleCare (back when it was sold in one-year increments). If they had truly had too many repairs, we could replace or even offer them an upgraded computer. There were other, minor things, but those were the biggies. I looked out for people with “pull” - writers, journalists, actors, musicians. Celebrities. I was more lenient with folks who had actually been long time customers. And since education was a huge market for Apple, schools, teachers and students were allowed just a bit more than everyone else. I followed the guidelines. I followed them closely.
Still, some folks complained. Even though I was a “Senior” Customer Relations agent, which means that customers had to complain about a lower level phone agent to even reach me and the small group I worked with, some folks decided that I wasn’t the end of the line. They wanted more, or they wanted to talk to someone even higher to see if they could get a different answer. Or they just weren’t satisfied with me or what I was saying or how I was saying it. I had verbal tactics, learned in the trenches the hard way, to try to talk them out of “escalating” or distract them. Those didn’t always work, though, and everyone in the business knows that it wasn’t due to a failure on my part. Human beings are just random, ornery folk.
My teammates, trained in the same classes and with the same living breathing irate customers I dealt with, had similar experiences. I remember T., who I considered a good friend, having several ongoing relationships with customers who were demanding something Apple would never give them, some incredible upgrade far beyond what was warranted by their particular computer failure, and T. would string them along for weeks, never allowing them to escalate and demand to talk to his boss.
For some reason, I got a string of customers that wouldn’t take that from me.
One could look up the corporate phone number for Apple, fish around in the system, and end up at the group that supposedly operated “just outside Steve’s office”: the group known as Executive Relations. In extreme cases, we could even voluntarily escalate a customer we thought deserved it, or, more likely, who was asking for out “boss”, to ER. They were the invisible third tier of customer relations. Some customers ended up there, one way or another.
Once someone found out the pattern for internal email addresses at Apple, it was very easy to figure out how to email Steve Jobs, one of the two founders of the company and celebrity CEO of the company. Even in 1998, this was moderately easy information to find out. Or it was also simple to send a real letter of complaint to One Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California and address it to Steve. Those, too, were handled by ER. They may still be operating today; I don’t know. This was over a decade ago. I’m sure there have been many internal changes at Apple since then.
But once a caller had gone to ER we in Senior CR did not touch them. The case was out of our hands. Customers, though, sometimes still had complaints about how they had been treated on the road to fabled Cupertino.
And Steve, back then, was very much a hands-on manager. Even in a company of (then) 8000 employees worldwide, he took a very intimate approach to running the place. If he knew of a problem, he would step in. He had (and has) the right to. It’s his company. No one denies that.
I can’t remember many details of the first time a customer had complained to Steve about me. I remember he was a salesman of some kind, back in the midwest, I think. And the problem he had with his computer was one that, after I gave him two upgrades, turned out to be caused by a piece of software he was installing on it, something Apple and its employees feel no responsibility for whatsoever. But this guy was good at complaining, and he went all the way to the top.
My boss, Kelly, was a soft-spoken friendly native Austinite, who had graduated a Longhorn from UT Austin, who was among the most awesome bosses I had ever known. One day in late fall he came to my cube and asked me if I had a minute. He led me to his cube, over by the window, and sat me down. Behind him, over his shoulder, was his computer monitor. He faced me, but the monitor was in clear sight to me.
He nodded without looking at what was on the screen and asked, “What can you tell me about [Asshole Customer]?”
I started to tell Kelly what was going on with this particular customer, up to the point where the guy said he’d get what he wanted and I was notified, later, that an agent in ER had been talking to him. But while I spilled the story, I could see, clearly, what was open on Kelly’s computer: it was an email, and the subject line was simply the case number and name of this particular customer, and it had exactly one line:
Fire whoever is responsible for this.
And it was signed “Steve J.”
It was air-conditioned in that building; it had to be, due to the Texas heat. But I was still sweating. I was honest, and thorough, but I was nervous. But when I finished the story, and explained that I had done everything by the book up until the guy went off to ER in a huff, Kelly sighed big, smiled, and relaxed.
“Oh, good. I don’t have to fire you” he said, and I relaxed, but not completely. I knew I was on notice from that point on.
I was doing the work, but the reward was still out of reach: I was not a white badge Apple employee. And now I knew that I had to basically pass muster with Steve himself in order to make that level.
All it took was another unruly customer, this time a writer for the New York Times whose name escapes me today, to complain to Steve, and prompt another meeting with my boss where I had to explain how the case had progressed that far. Once again, there was a terse, one-line email from Steve demanding action for any mistake. Once again, I was operating within the guidelines that were handed down. Once again, I was safe for the moment.
In a few weeks, when a few white badge positions opened up, I of course applied. I went through the interview process with all the others. I did my best. But the black marks on my record, the fact that Steve himself had had to intervene, prevented my bosses from selecting me for promotion to actual Apple Employee. My co-workers who did get picked were excellent folk, doing good work, and I praise them highly. We served in Hell together. We were brothers and sisters in arms. But I was not to join them.
In December, late one Friday, as I was preparing to leave to meet my family in Cancun for a well-earned Christmas vacation, Kelly called me into his cube one last time.
He explained that he knew I was good at what I do, but I was unlucky. After two complaints from the CEO, he had to do something. He told me that he knew I loved Apple, and that I bled rainbow colors, and that I knew my job backwards and forward… but.
He said I could stay at Apple as a contractor, but I could not work in Customer Relations anymore. He offered me a choice of working in front line tech support, or in the group that sells computers to schools. Kelly explained all he knew about the managers in each group, and said he’d give me the highest recommendation. Unspoken, though, was the idea that this was a demotion. Or so it felt to me. Tech support has all of the stress of dealing with upset customers with lesser pay and higher expectations of keeping the calls short and the success rate high. Sales support was, well, sales, and therefore, to a geek like me, a lesser calling entirely (I had all the arrogance of the geek back then; I may still have it but I would like to think I’ve mellowed). He told me to think about the choices, enjoy my vacation, and he’d help me with whatever I chose when I returned.
I told no one in my family that I was being demoted; I didn’t want to harsh the mood of the holiday. Maybe I should have. Maybe they would have offered plenty of support. Regardless, I kept the secret.
I chose Sales Support, in spite of my arrogance, just because it took me out of the building where I would not run into my promoted co-workers. I was ashamed. I worked the phones there for a couple of months, but my spirit was broken. I didn’t see me ever getting a white badge while everyone knew that Steve had spoken on high about my skills.
In early February, I bought a ticket back to Portland, and started looking for a new job. Luckily, the tech boom was still happening and I got hired on.
I still love Apple computers, though. I always will. And Steve is still the CEO of Apple.
I can’t imagine Apple without him.
