Apple to the core

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Jan Mythos Antonio, 40, of Quezon City is a call center directory assistance agent. He’s worked as an animator and computer graphic artist. His continued fascination with computers has led him to toy with components, old and new, “seeing which matches with which.”

I will never forget the last quarter of 2002 when a road accident confined me for the rest of the year in my mother’s house. It never occurred to me that doing nothing in a quiet house was so much work. But I had to endure the temptation to launch into the normal world if I was to fully recuperate. How excruciating it would have been to hear the minutes tick by and watch the dust fly in the fermenting light of the sun on its way to the west, had it not been for a business book — a business book! — that unexpectedly sent me back thinking about my first job, at a time when I thought I ruled the world.

I was 20 years old, ignited with thoughts of work, ablaze with the enthusiasm of holding my first job, and raking in as much as P25,000 a month as an animator in one of the country’s proud foreign-owned animation companies. During those days I felt omnipotent, immortal: I was employed in a company that paid a hefty salary, having fun, doing what I loved to do best. It felt like the days would never end.

I remember the expensive shirts, wearing nothing but the latest Levi’s, and those great shoes. I remember the health clubs, the expensive restaurants, the concerts, the premier movie nights. Yet, being basically a homebody, I gave priority to my home-theater system with my 25-inch Sony color TV with stereo speakers, and the cool silver-gray VHS player. Hey, it was the beginning of the 1990s, okay? I was still to find out what VCD actually meant! Heck, I didn’t even know exactly what VHS meant! But I was rich and I could afford it. That’s the point.

And while my colleagues went bar-hopping every night and smoked their lungs out without regard to health, I chose a collection of credit cards, the latest National Bookstore bestsellers, and towering stacks of US comic books made up mainly of titles such as Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, DC’s Hellblazer, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and his various works. But half of these would be the “X” titles: the adjective-less X-Men, The Uncanny X-Men (I still need issue 268, by the way), X-Factor, X-Force, Excalibur (close enough) and Wolverine. You can tell I love this part, can’t you?

Then, In 1997, foreign clients began successfully scouring other regions of Asia, like India, in search of cheaper labor. Because of this, many in the industry headed to the US with their drawing skills, to battle obsolescence. For those left with only their love for the craft, they had to survive the “hungry years.” It was the same for those who could make a transition to another profession — a group to which I belonged. But woe to those whose god was mammon: even when in the US, they never made it with the demands of the foreign management, and instead chose menial jobs to face the reality that the golden years had ended for us all.

All these memories came back in a flash while sifting through Jim Carlton’s Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania and Business Blunders. I felt the pride and excitement of the computer engineers who were hand-picked by Apple Computer Inc.’s founder, the great Steve Jobs, to build the ground-breaking “Macintosh” — the first PC to sport a truly functional “graphical user interface,” controlled by a device called, to this day, a “mouse” — a truly Apple invention. I read about the pampering that Jobs lavished on his engineers: the at-the-desk massages, coolers stacked with freshly squeezed orange juice, first-class plane tickets for flights lasting over two hours, and a Boesendorfer piano installed in the lab’s lobby. And why wouldn’t the visionary Jobs spoil his engineers when these were the minds that harnessed his dreams and turned them into reality? If not for them, there would be no Macintosh, no iMac, no iPhone, no iPod or iTunes.

A few years later — April 11, 1985, to be exact — when Jobs was ousted from his CEO position (which actually proved fatal for the company in the long term), those same engineers continued to be treated like royalty. There were automatic pay raises of about 10 percent every six months, from an annual pay ranging from $50,000 to $90,000, 20 percent higher than in the rest in the PC industry. There were profit-sharing contributions from the company each year, equivalent to 15 percent of one’s annual salary. It was the best place in the world to be: a great company with a great product, created by some of the greatest minds of the computer world, doing what they did best and making a fortune at the same time.

The company’s headquarters resembled a vast university campus, with employees, fresh out of college, sporting a range of casual uniforms from T-shirts and jeans to shorts and tank tops. Suits were almost never worn, except when trying to impress some business honcho. Imagine an army of scruffy-looking engineers wearing T-shirts that say “Working 90 Hours a Week and Loving It.” There were no set schedules or work hours, accommodating the individual whether he or she decided to show up in the middle of the night, punch out at noon, or preferred the regular nine-to-five routine. Little breaks for winding down led to geek showdowns at the basketball and volleyball courts.

I felt my heart flood with emotion, reading about the glory days and all the perks, so I shut the book. It was my third time to read it, so I knew how the story ended. I couldn’t help thinking about many of my comrades who were buried in the graveyard of our old world, those who never came to terms with the changing times or stubbornly clung to an evaporated dream. If those in Apple were driven by the slogan “Giving computers to empower the people,” I remember how in our smugness we would boast: “We don’t need computers; anything computers can do we can do better with our hands because we do it with a human heart, something a computer will never have.” We never foresaw the advent of the new age of computer animation, Jobs’ Pixar and creations like Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles. We were left behind only with our hands: our talented, magical, empty hands.