ANTI :: 1984
End times, civil civil war, and ticking our buttholes with the feather duster of nostalgia
by M. Adamson
W
e're dreaming of living in the end of days. The end times. The dust of pre-apocalypse is settling upon us and among us, and we couldn't be more delighted to rub each other's noses in it. And our best weapon in our arsenal in this civil, civil war is our computer, where we can gain access to like-minded freedom fighters, facts to support our beliefs, and of course, tickle our buttholes with the feather duster of nostalgia.
In 1984 I didn't know shit about what a Macintosh was. Back then, the closest I got to anything resembling a computer was when I was casually observing my brother diligently copy code into the Commodore 16 from a book on basic. We checked out books of code at the library, so we could play a "Star Wars" game, which required as much imagination as, well, a book. Computers were a novelty, mostly for rich kids or nerds, or rich nerds. Our parents scooped up the Commodore after going to the coast and sitting through a four-hour presentation on the virtues of owning a time share. They sat through the bullshit, took the computer, drove home, plugged it into the tv, and we were off. The Commodore 16 was later upgraded to a 64, which was ultimately replaced by the NES, because we mostly used it for video games.
At school we would occasionally use an Apple IIe (OG Oregon Trail) or some kind of IBM clone machine in order to do math or practice typing; obediently placing our fingers on the home-row keys. To me, computers were sterile and boring, and not for creativity. In fact, the very idea of using a computer for an artistic pursuit was counterproductive. Computers were for endless busy work.
In 1989, Apple made a commercial that had a profound impact on me as a youngster. The ad featured a young female professional, who was very frustrated and intimidated by the idea that she had to use a computer. Of course, the computer she was forced to use was a Mac, so by the end of the commercial everything was fine and she even admitted that she was wrong. As a child, I didn't really understand the casual sexism in the ad, but one thing was crystal clear: you were going to have to learn how to use a computer; everyone was, and nobody was interested in hearing you fucking complain about it.
When I was first introduced to the Mac, in 1992 with the Macintosh Classic, it was with the intention to finish a specific artistic task, but more specifically for a practical artistic purpose: building the high school newspaper. We wrote, edited, and constructed every edition on the Mac Classic with Claris Works and PageMaker. We stared at that little monochrome 512x342 CRT writing articles and adjusting layout, after which we printed them out and pasted them onto the full-sized contact sheets on light boards. Then they went to the local newspaper where they applied halftone screens to our photos, and sent everything off to print.
I was afforded a lot of artistic leeway as a young student; I started off as the staff cartoonist and illustrator, and eventually worked my way up to photo editor. I spent hours studying how the mac would reinterpret images and photos into pixels and dots in a logical black-and-white dithered pattern, as opposed to the manual halftone screen for printing.
After I graduated high school, I made post cards and flyers to promote my band using a PowerBook 145b. It had a slightly larger screen, but still used that delicious duo-chrome look on its one-bit-per-pixel passive matrix display. I would design them in Claris Works, and print them out on the StyleWriter 1200. My day job was at a regional copy shop chain, spending my days printing business cards and wedding invitations while sweating over a Therm-o-Type machine connected to an offset-press. One evening, a friend from high school called me, and the conversation went something like this:
"Hey, do you still remember how to use a Mac?"
"Yeah, sure, I guess," I said.
"Well, my company is having a hiring fair this Friday and they're looking to hire people to work on a Mac support team."
"Okay."
He gave me the details and I drove over Friday after work. My friend worked at one of those large tech support firms that contracted support and customer service to large computer companies like Microsoft, HP, and Apple, to name a few. Back in 1996 when you called for tech support, you probably weren't talking to an employee of the company with the misbehaving hardware, you were talking to someone who worked for one of these outsourced tech support firms. Of course, they never admitted that. They answered the phone announcing their affiliation as fact; as if they could bump into Bill Gates in the break room. Some customers actually believed that. In a few short years, all of these jobs would be shipped off overseas to some company in India, where they worked for pennies and spoke better English.
Tickle, tickle.
When I arrived, I realized that I was way out of my element. There were people handing out their resumes in their handing-out-resume-suits, while I was there wearing a sweaty flannel and jeans, with ink from the week's printing in my nails and the cracks in my hands. Job fair, right. I didn't have my resume, I filled out an application and took the five-question test for the support position. My previous experience working on the school newspaper had not prepared me for this in the least. By a process of elimination, I was able to make an educated guess on some of them. On another question, I remembered the old adage, "when in doubt, go with Charlie." C it was. I didn't know what a P-RAM was and how or why I would want to zap it. The fuck? I handed everything in to the polite people in charge of the job fair and I drove home.
ater that night, I got a phone call. They wanted me to come in on Monday for an interview. At the end of the call, I casually asked how many of the questions I got right on the questionnaire. "Five out of five," announced the cheerful voice on the other end of the phone.
This time I wore a tie. I showed up clean and on time. While I was waiting for my interview, I looked around at the other employees milling around the office. It was right out of central casting; all of the classic computer-guy characters you could imagine. One of them was walking down the hall clutching some papers. He was a very tall and large man with thick glasses, and a gaze spacing off into nowhere as he walked. He turned the corner through the waiting area, and shoulder-checked a corner wall as he made his way though.
"Holy shit," I thought," I hope I don't work with that dude." That dude turned out to be my interviewer.
My interviewer, we'll call him Ben, was a really nice guy. He got right down to business, and we talked about my computer experience, what I knew about Macs, and what I knew about the internet. I talked about my Mac experience, and what I knew about computers in general. What did I know about the internet? My previous experience with the internet was trolling internet nerds and trawling for softcore ASCII porn on Compuserve. I didn't tell him any of this.
Ben's questions got a little more technical, and I broke a rule of job interview etiquette: I cut him off. I politely explained that technically speaking, I knew very little about the Mac, and I confessed that I had guessed on most of the five-question test on the application. There was that blank stare again. I could read his mind, and he was thinking, "the fuck?" We went to another office where I talked to a different manager. I got the, "we'll call you", and I went home.
On Thursday I got a job offer. I accepted. I quit the print shop the next day.
On my first day of the job, I found out that instead of doing tech support, I was going to be working for what the lower and middle management of the company called, "The Scream Team". I was going to be on the Apple Customer Relations team. I would be fielding calls on behalf of Apple, and solving customer problems. The first thing they made clear was that all of us would have thicker skin after the first month working the phones. Oh, and free coffee.
I was not terribly excited about this new prospect of getting screamed at over the phone all day, but the pay was about twice what I made at the print shop. So, hey, free coffee.
About 15 minutes into the orientation briefing, Ben opened the door and stuck his massive head into the room. He called three names, and said they were to come with him. One of the names he called was mine.
Turned out I wasn't going to be working on the Scream Team that day. I was going to work on the brand new AICK team. Apple had just released this software package (on CDR!) called the Apple Internet Connection Kit, that allowed hobbyists to connect their Mac to the Internet. It wasn't a gated community of information like AOL or Compuserve, it was the wild, wild west of the internet. We're talkin' about Netscape Navigator. It was back when things like Mac OS X were just like Apple turning a profit: a wild rumor made of fan-boy dreams.
Tickle, tickle.
I spent weeks learning about modems and browsers and dialers, not to mention extensions and preferences and plug-ins. It was my first sink-or-swim lesson in fake it 'til you make it. In a few weeks I was answering tech calls and starting to enjoy my life as a tech support guy. AICK was really taking off, too. It seemed like this internet thing was really catching on and could stick around for a while. It was getting so popular, that it was bundled with the new Mac OS 8. Good news for our team, right? Job security, right? Well, Apple decided to dissolve our team and send the internet support to the different platform support teams. If you're old enough to remember, back in the late 90s, before Steve Jobs returned and booted Gil Amelio as CEO, Apple had all kinds of hardware, and a different support team for each. There was a PowerBook team, the Performa team, the PowerMac team, the legacy support team (hello, Quadra), and a team for every printer, monitor, and scanner that Apple slapped their badge onto. These support teams were all over the US. At our location, we had the AICK team, and the Scream Team.
In the many months and thousands of calls with angry Apple customers that followed, I did develop a thicker skin. The coffee, however, was quickly replaced with one of those vending machines with poker cups. Winning. Every. Day. I bought a PowerMac 8600/300 with a hefty employee discount (but months before the G3 chip was announced), with a monitor and a Quicktake 200, and continued designing flyers, stickers, etc for my band and other bands. The writing was on the wall for the Scream Team in late 1997 when Jobs came back and started to make changes in the company. In summer of 1998 we knew it was near the end for our team when we started getting calls about when we're going to start selling that new computer on our website. New computer? Apple announced the new iMac on their site and the Customer Relations team had no idea. Pretty soon we got the word that the team was being phased out and being moved back in-house.
I was transferred to a support team for a major financial firm. The team had a zero-hold time policy, so we were way over-staffed. This meant I had time to teach myself html and continue to learn how Photoshop worked.
Eventually, computers and creativity were hand-in-hand. It was a no-brainer. It was more work to do it any other way. Soon I was making websites on my 8600 with Photoshop 3.0 and a text editor. Eventually I landed a job at a local ad agency as an in-house designer while I continued free-lancing on the side.
Then there was the dot-com bust of 2000, followed by hanging chad in Florida, which was followed by nineuhleven.
Now, of course, we're saturated with tech. Our reality is a blur of sending command line to our family in the next room, while we confuse our devices the way your parents used to confuse your siblings. "Hey Siri... Shit. I mean, Alexa..."
So yeah, good times. I'll put the feather duster away now. Prime will send me a new one overnight.
M. Adamson (@mxadamcom) is a Creative Director at Flint and Sage. He still has the Quicktake 200.