Got to break the norm of not blogging and start blogging again, without the burden of the emotional bits. Thought it was funny to start with experiences - this one is one which is close to the end of a whirlwind trip to US recently for training which I stopped by San Francisco and then headed back.
The bad news was that we went through the once in a year storm which delayed the plane after it got out of the hangar with all the passengers, and then it went back and we had to reboard again a few hours later and missed the connecting.
Met a young engineer on the plane sitting next to me on the way back from San Francisco to HK recently. Normally the more you travel for work or business, the less chatty people are - everyone does some courtesy chit chat and then they pour into their work, all believing they are doing the most important thing in the world. This was no different, however, after 3 hrs on the flight and getting unboarded and then getting back on another 4+ hrs later, the tiredness broke the silence. So I chatted up the young dude - he was an engineer from Apple. His earlier first attempt (1st boarding) of being chatty was pretty much a few lines.
Round 1 (1st boarding)
He - "I always forget to bring a book" (on seeing me throwing out a small novel - one I bought at the airport drug store together with some Reeses)
I - "Well, you can always see 4 movies or more..."
He - "You know, one has to diversify"
I - "Ok, maybe different types of movies..." (duh - clearly I was jet lag)
He - "Yeah, the only book I brought is engineering books" (duh - clearly a pretty nerdish reply!)
Round 2 (2nd boarding) - he was very late - and he was sitting in the inner seat, so I stood around wondering if the dude has absconded the flight (after waiting 4 hrs+). Then he strolled in.
I - "I thought you have given up"
He - "Well, not apparently not yet"
After settling down and asking plesanteries of where he was heading out to whether HK or somewhere else... found out he was heading for Shenzen, and he proceeded to tell me about jet lag... eventually...
I - "So, are you an engineer? I saw those engineering books you were reading... " (duh...)
He - Actually I work with Apple in the hardware side. (Me... **ting ting, the most beautiful job** if I were 10 years younger ... now rapt with attention)
I - "Oh, thats interesting... do you guys have a lot of people in Shenzhen?".... and the question I asked twice -- "by the way... what is the next big thing coming out from apple...?" heheh.. of which he twice answered "... now I can't tell you ..." heheh..
Did not find out what the guy's name was. He was quite decently handsome. Found out he had worked 3.5 years in Apple, probably still single, looks around 28+ out of college. Polite young man. Said his please and thank yous and did not ask for alcohol or heavy food or beverage from the cabin service. What was more interesting was a couple of cool things we chatted about in summary, started and was more on iphone purely because I told him I do not like the typing, and he started to explain to me how the pixels worked (!duh... really a pure engineer, even I could not understand!)
Anyway, some other things I thought I'd share here just for fun :
- One interesting experience he related to me was how they would do all sorts of test, one test had been that they found there was a lot of returns of the iphone saying the headpieces sound was not good. What they found was that the headphones had a defect in being very prone to shorting out due to sweat (!!!). The sweat would crystalize in certain parts causing a short and the poor sound. The lab boys apparently tested sweat on a few components and finally fixed it making it more resistant to sweat.
- He said he never got to get a iphone because Apple has return policies and honors them, thus the engineers have boxes and boxes of the phone which are returns - so he has two phones - one hacked jailbreaked and one original.. (and he was so proud of it heheh!) - I reconsidered and did not ask whether the licenses were checked like microsoft does when you login online (this was my biggest curiousity as I owned a apple macbook)
- He agreed with me that Snow Leopard was a bug fix but yet people queue up to buy it... (there finally someone agrees!)
- He explained to me the different types of drop test the iphone goes through (duh!! - heheh)
-I told him where I worked but he seemed to have no idea (!! duh!!! - this guy is really young or katak di bawah tempurung or something!). I proceeded to talk about how we really related to our clients about Apple's customer experience and the store experience - of which he had no idea what I was talking about - heheh...
- I told him about the concept of content is king to software and apple was just shipping hardware consoles to enable this - he also could not understand this (heheh), but proceeded to tell me he knows of friends who now makes a living coding apple applications, but he could not do it as he was an employee, and would probably have to sell it through a middle man... (wah, so innocent!)
This was my first really young experience with a fellow passenger - typically the older dudes sit in the business class or those really yuppie ones who pound on their notebooks. This guy was just so funnily innocent and engaged and it was one of those moments that I thought - I got to tell people that I sat next to an apple engineer - this is really cool. Heheh
Well, I thought I would diversify and be really young about this blog. I am obviously not attracted to this guy. But I was definitely enriched in listening to him talk about his job, especially with a company I thought would be a who's who on the employer's list!
After departing in HK, I reflected that this dude was perhaps one of the most engaged young engineer I've ever met - most of the people I get to hire or work with nowadays are really so dis-engaged, and expects the bosses to shower them attention, but few are engaged, polite, and speak passionately about their work with the light of innocence of this young chap.
Perhaps, there is indeed hope for Gen Y and also hope for Gen X in understanding Gen Y.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment