Gregory's ServerI also needed a new car, well, wanted one. And I’d bought a new Volkswagen Cabriolet for pick up at the factory in Osnabrück, West Germany (yes, West Germany). I invited my girlfriend at the time to come to Europe, we’d start in Rome, rail to Basel, boat up the Rhine to Düsseldorf, then rail over to the factory. Pick up the car, tool through the Hartz Mountains, drop it off in Frankfurt and have it shipped home. A good three-week break.
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 And you could call this 800 number from any phone anywhere, punch in your mailbox number, and listen to the messages. So he’d leave me messages about anything happening that I needed to know about. Oh, he said, lots of Europe doesn’t have touch-tone yet. So get yourself a DTMF tone generator, like this. Just place the international call to the 800 number then hold this up to the handset and punch your mailbox number. Easy. So off we go to Florence and Rome. Except that four days before I left, John fired Steve and put Jean-Louis in charge of all product development. And further organizational news would follow. Whee! So we’d settled in to a little pensione in Florence near the Piazza Della Signora. (No view of the Arno.) After jet lag and the initial tourist stops, a couple days in I begin to wonder a bit about what’s happening back home. The pensione of course doesn’t have guest telephones in the room, or even the lobby. I’m used to this. To make a phone call, (Sit down, youngsters) To make a phone call you had to go to the PTT in the square, go to the basement, take a number, have a seat, wait until you are called, go to the booth they indicate, then give the number you want to call to the operator (who only speaks Italian). They dial, you talk, then on the way out you pay in lira. The operators had been doing things this way since the end of WWII, and dealt with hundreds of foreign tourists a day, mostly students on Eurail passes doing the Let’s Go Europe backpacking tour and calling home usually to get parents to wire money to the American Express office so they can make it to the next city. I’d done that, I knew the drill. And so did they. But this time I was a Businessman, a Technologist, and I had something Important to do. With Technology. The first problem was getting them to dial a toll-free number in the US. There is no reason to make an international call to a toll-free US number, and they didn’t know how or care to learn. It was not Done. You called your parents, your spouse, maybe your office. Then when I managed to get them to dial it, when it picked up they rattled off their boilerplate spiel and waited for a reply. And none came because it was a voicemail box. So they hung up. This took more tries (and more lira) My Italian was nothing like up to the challenge of explaining to an Italian telephone operator how to do her job differently than she had ever done it before. But even when I convinced them that it was OK, nobody would answer, and they let me connect to what they felt was dead air… then I did something astounding and frightening. I PLAYED THE DTMF TONES. My God it was like I was trying to steal relics from the Duomo. What black art was I practicing? Why was I doing Privileged Things that only Operators were Allowed to do? Was I a criminal? A spy? I remember that after I got the mailbox number entered correctly and a friendly American telephone voice came on the line they calmed down and let me continue the call. It had been arduous just to get into the booth, even more so to place the call, and now I had to wade through the new messages. And that, dear readers, is how I heard that Guy’s software company pitch was canned; I wasn’t going to be taking over for him; instead I’d be working for Ed Colby in System Software Product Marketing. And that my old group, User Education, was merging with Apple II/III User Education and all my directs would be working for that group’s manager, not for me anymore. That was just one of the many One Apple group mergers Sculley had directed Gassée to make. (@scottknaster knows the punchline) And that group manager, to whom all of my old directs would now be working, who’d been running Apple II and III Pubs while I was doing Mac and Lisa, was my mother. There’d been a corporate power struggle for control of a merged 100-person team, I’d lost, my Mom won, and I was five thousand miles away before I even heard about it. (My Mom was a great manager, and while she questioned some of my hiring choices, most of my folk loved working for her.) And that’s the story of how I went to Europe, lost my group to my Mom, but did get a great car. @Cdespinosa That was amazing storytelling, what a fun way to start in to the week. Thank you! I guess it took us another ten-ish years until we got widespread DTMF over here in Germany…   @Cdespinosa this was a great story; I enjoyed reading it a lot. Amused by the thought of family dinners afterwards. Also, saw this article the other day and it seemed timely considering. Thought you might appreciate it. @Cdespinosa Love these old stories. I worked for a reseller from 1988-1998 in Australia, but first machine was a II Plus in 1981. Great days. The best. @Cdespinosa using a DTMF tone generator and leaving voicemails is still how we communicate with each other in evangelism. Well, when our sophisticated network of mail carrier pigeons needs a rest, anyway. 😝 great read and a great car!  @Cdespinosa Amazing story, in many ways. Thanks for sharing, Chris! 😊 @Cdespinosa What a story! And the only time that Osnabrück is mentioned in the same sentence as revolutionary high tech stuff @Cdespinosa did not see your mom entering the story coming, plot twist!!   @Cdespinosa Back then you could REALLY disconnect. I remember and I miss it. No vacation is really the same anymore. But talk about perfect time on yours :)  @Cdespinosa what an incredible story! Thanks for sharing.  @Cdespinosa Was that the VW you bought by selling AAPL stock that would be worth gazillions today? @schwa If (totally hypothetically) I had chosen not to buy a $12,000 car in March 1985, invested that sum in $AAPL instead, and held it until today, it would be worth twenty five million dollars.  @Cdespinosa @schwa back in the early 80’s my mom’s aunt convinced her not to invest in Microsoft. :blobcatcoffee:  |
Things at work, though, were a little…unsettled. And back then, international travel meant being unreachable, unless you were staying in first-class hotels, which was not the plan. Guy advised me to try to keep in touch. To help with that, he gave me early access to a brand-new technology: corporate voice mail. He’d gotten Steve to spring for it for all of Evangelism because of the travel they were doing. People could call a special number and leave a message in a voice mailbox for you!