I'm a genius! Not so fast...
The interview with Steve went on longer than most, its safe to say we had several minutes together more than the others. How long I don't recall. I do remember him telling me that I would be one of the genii hired if I accepted the offer. So not that fast. Apple had this gatekeeper model during hiring. Get through the headhunter….check. Get through the tech guy,…check Get through the physical interview, …check. Get offered... Funny thing is I never thought I would get this far and kind of forgot that if hired I would get PAID to work at Apple. That's how naive I was at the time. I was doing fairly well doing graphic design and wasn't in any need for more money. Wasn't this was really for the adventure, right? I have and, continue to, apply for jobs and interview to practice. It's been my thinking that interviewing is something you do so infrequently enough that you can get rusty and should practice. I have been told by past employers that I am a pretty good interviewer but just like anything you should practice. I have applied for jobs I would never get and for jobs that they would fall over to have me. Getting to the offer stage hasn't been that rare for me but the stakes, this time, were much higher. I was barely 30 and this would be a change in my career that I didn't anticipate. What was I thinking, just accept a job because you love the company, the story, the product? It seemed foolish. I knew nothing about "tech" support and worse, customer service in a retail setting. The bigger problem if your following along was that at that age, I was pretty successful as a designer, you know the ads in the big magazines, the billboards. I may have had a big ego at the age of 28 years old. In honestly I was more of a jerk than anything, but this was Apple.
I had lots of conversations with myself, my friends and my family. This whole genius thing sounded way too difficult for me to do, standing there answering questions all day long. Thats not my style, Im pretty hyper and have lots of energy, to this day. Standing at the genius bar all day long, not my style. So I waited for the call for the inevitable offer which I would decline.
