Saturday, November 12, 2011

"Don't make me send you another hippie."

Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography is a hoot thus far. Atari engineer Al Alcorn, finding that problem-child Jobs wants to quit and go to India, gets him closer to the subcontinent by sending him to Germany to solve a tech problem:
Jobs spent a few days in Munich, where he solved the interference problem, but in the process he flummoxed the dark-suited German managers. They complained to Alcorn that he dressed and smelled like a bum and behaved rudely. "I said, 'Did he solve your problem?' And they said, 'Yeah.' I said, 'If you got any more problems, you just call me, I got more guys just like him!' They said, 'No, no we'll take care of it next time.'"

2 comments:

  1. "problem child"? I bet you wish you were a problem child.

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  2. Alas, I share some of Jobs's bad qualities, but few of his good ones.

    But if you prefer hagiography to biography, might want to skip the Isaacson.

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