Burnt Toast and Cool Cats
June 1st, 2008There was a period, 1996-1997 if memory serves, when I single-handedly did all the North American tech support for a new CD burning application called Toast. I was retained by a small German company, Astarte, when it became obvious that their German support staff could not keep up with the growing Toast user base.
They sent over a Care package with a CD burner*, a load of blanks, and the software. We set up the phone line and in no time I was fielding calls. Most Toast users didn’t have email yet, so the telephone was the primary lifeline for users. Being a longtime Mac user, and having written several user manuals for complex Mac products before, I was able to get up to speed fast, and had little trouble helping users with the basics. But when it came to the more esoteric CD burning stuff like power calibration errors, lead-out errors, ISO image tools and so on, I had an emergency hotline to the guy who knew it all: the creator and lead engineer of Toast, Markus Fest. Whenever I was stuck, I knew he’d have the answer.
(sitting in the Munich airport, waiting for my flight home…so writing may be interrupted anytime.)
*At the time I didn’t even own a CD burner, as they were still quite expensive.
I’ve been to hell and back the past several months, but things are beginning to stabilize…at least enough that I feel I can start writing again. Time will tell, but I’ll try.
