Jobs Well Done

I watched a movie online the other day that was filmed in Ireland. I didn’t recognize one of the vehicles, so I Googled Irish cars and came up with nothing, as I suspected, but one of the search results led me to a question about the positioning of floor pedals, particularly with regard to left and right side driving, meaning which side the steering wheel is on. Do the pedals change positions? No, they don’t. It’s CBA the world over - Clutch, Brake, Accelerator, left to right. Some things never change. Some things do. Sometimes, it’s for the better.

Left-side and right-side driving made me think again about living in a right-handed world when I am quite left-handed. Of course, left-handed people must learn to adapt, and the older I’ve gotten, the more adept I’ve become, but it still doesn’t go without notice. There will forever be minor issues, all of which right-handed people take for granted every day.

As many of you know by now, I spent years in the design trade before transitioning into writing. I still like to dabble in design work, and in most cases, I do it gratis to help out friends or friends of friends. Since I am a creative sort, I use more of the right side of my brain than some, such as mathematicians, logicians and the like who conceptualize more in algorithms and computations. That’s from the left-side. It’s more of a black & white world, where mine is more in shades of gray and multiple colors. I have always thought more abstractly. Think different, so to speak. God knows, that describes me to a “T”.

When I moved to the Orlando area in 1981, I quickly got a job working for an advertising agency. I did everything by hand while sitting comfortably at my rather large art board. By the late 80s, rumors began floating that very much startled me and the others I worked with. To be blunt, I was afraid of change. We were going to swap in our art boards and conventional methods of design for brand-spanking new computers. I had absolutely no knowledge of the intimidating gizmos that were supposed to simplify our jobs, and I had no idea how I would adjust. I mean, the way we plodded our trade had been done the same way for thousands of years, with adjustments, of course, but a t-square has been around a long time, for instance. This was going to be one giant change I wasn’t quite ready for, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Besides, I was never one to walk away from a new way of thinking. Think different, after all.

In 1990, I sat in front of my first computer. It was a Macintosh. Wow! This is like playing Space Invaders and I’m getting paid to do it, was my first thought. In other words, while initially apprehensive, I found this new tool to be something I could learn to understand and love, and I quickly warmed up to it. It grew on me. It came with desktop publishing software called Aldus PageMaker, and the newspaper layouts that normally took an hour to create were condensed to about 15-minutes. Those of us who acclimated well became more productive and within a month’s time, I had that computer saying “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid you can’t do that” whenever someone made an error or hit the wrong key. Once I grasped the world of computers, I never looked back. Today marks 21-years of experience in front of a keyboard and I have only one person to thank - Steve Jobs.

While Bill Gates and Microsoft ventured into the fray of consumer-friendly operating systems, meaning personal computers, in 1992, Windows 3.1 was never close to what Apple started in 1984 with the advent of the Mac OS. Mac was the first to use a completely graphical operating system instead of a command line. Remember those days of DOS commands? C:\enter. Macs were a dream, and they weren’t prone to crashing. Mac was completely user friendly and that’s what made my switch from the art board to a computer so smooth. I compared Mac to Windows operating systems as the difference between cutting through soft or hard butter. In those early days, I fell in love with Mac computers and it’s a love that’s never left me.

Today, Mac computers still have the edge in the graphic design business, but Windows has come a long, long way. As stable as Mac OS has been, Windows 7 is just about as good, so why would I continue to give Mac the edge? The answer is simple, because, no matter what, Windows has always played catch-up to Mac. So has the rest of the world, and for that, I give credit to Steve Jobs for what he did with his creation - Apple. From the mouse on up to the iPad, of which I am a proud owner, it was Jobs who had much to do with what we take for granted today. The first smart phone was an Apple. The rest of the tech-world scrambled. That’s what Jobs did. He was a creative genius and a visionary, able to design and market, and if I could only harness 10% of his mind, I would be one, too. That’s not going to happen, so instead, all I can do is say, thank you, Steve. While some things never change, you dramatically changed the world and the way we think. Thank you for making art, design, writing, and every day living easier for me. You were Apple. You were Mac. You dreamed in black, white, shades of gray, and every color in the rainbow.

While the more the world changes, the more it remains the same, I’m glad you got to see the life altering changes you made, and like Thomas Edison, you will live on in perpetuity because of it. And that’s something that will never change.