I want to shadow Steve Jobs

Let’s imagine for a short moment that all my dreams come true and say 4 months from now I will be jumping on a plane to San Francisco to meet Steve Jobs. 1, Infinity Loop, Cupertino - here I come.

I get off the cab, go to the reception and am almost p…ing my pants when I tell the security guy “I’m supposed to meet Mr. Jobs…” He looks at me strangely and asks “May I have an ID, please?” He has a look at it and calls somebody. “Please wait over there, Mr.” I sit down in one of the designer armchairs in the lobby and wait.

10 minutes later a regular guy with turtle neck and glasses is heading towards me. Oh, my god it’s… not Steve Jobs. “Hi, my name is Stanley. We’ll just have to go through a couple of administrative things before we go to Steve’s office.” “OK, no problem”, I hear myself say - still shocked by the black turtle neck. Is this some kind of uniform?

Stanley brings me to a small room with a table, two chairs and a seemingly infinite number of photos on the walls. Sad photos. Photos of desperate people. Photos of people in court rooms. Photos of people crying in front of their houses while policemen take their furniture, their car and everything what is remotely valuable. I am starting to be scared…

“Don’t worry”, that’s Stanley’s voice, “this won’t happen to you. Just stick to the rules. As you will surely understand we have to protect our company secrets. You’ll follow Steve and will see our most recent product developments. We can’t risk that any of this gets out of the Apple campus.” And then he hands me over a one page non disclosure agreement - an Apple logo on top and very neatly laid out in the venerable Helvetica font. Written in some law talk it reads like Apple would chop off my hands if I only have the slightest thought of writing a word about what I will see and will stitch my lips if I only distantly consider talking about it.

“Consider my lips sealed”, I say while signing the paper.