Writers Block Live

When I was growing up and at the beginning of my career, the last name Evangelist always drew comments about Billy Graham and other religion-related remarks. But that changed in the 80s when Apple and other technology companies began to employ ‘evangelists’ to help spread the word about their products. On hearing that Apple had evangelists, I thought ‘that’s what I should be doing’. Afterall, I’d been an evangelist since 1954; who better to have such a job.

Without even realizing it, many of the career choices I made after that were influenced by this feeling that I was born to do that job. I sought out any work that was Mac related, and sent resumes to every Mac developer I could find. Some of these efforts worked out better than others.

Having had some success in 1987 putting an interactive version of my resume on floppy disc, resulting in a job at Mirror Technologies, I decided to try it again in early 1988. But this time I had a new, much more powerful tool: Apple’s new Hypercard. My first disk-based resumes had used a kludgy system of having a macro program (called Tempo) automatically start up when the computer booted, open MacWrite, and then actually type my resume as the recipient watched. The effect was moderately impressive, but there were too many places for things to go wrong. Hypercard let me make something that was far more robust, and flexible.

I was still out of work after the stock market crash had killed Cognetics, and feeling rather pessimistic. It seemed that the novelty of the resume on disk might help open some doors that had been closed before. I send out several copies of the disk, to local companies, and with supreme optimism, to Apple’s Macintosh evangelist, Kin Seto (knowing his name and reputation from stories in MacWeek and Macintosh Today.) I felt he was bound to be impressed with the way I used Mac technology to make my case. But I heard nothing from Apple, so assumed he was less impressed than I counted on. A few weeks later I got a call from a company, called Moniterm, that made high resolution computer monitors. Two interviews later I had a job as their Apple product manager. I put the idea of working at Apple out of my mind. Or so I thought.

The following year I was in San Jose for the Apple Developer Conference and I met Kin in person at one of the sessions. I introduced myself by ribbing him about using my name without permission. To my great surprise, he remembered my name and even remembered getting my Hypercard resume! Further, and even more surprising, he said he had passed it on to personnel with a recommendation to recruit me. (It apparently fell through the cracks, as I never heard from them.) I was stunned, to know I had come so close to getting my foot in the door, and missed the chance.

As you can see, I saved a copy of the floppy resume, and it still works flawlessly on my old Mac Plus.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 4:30 pm and is filed under The Book - Jobs Ive Known. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.