From refusing to have a car licence plate to wearing one “uniform” every working day of the last decade of his life, Steve Jobs certainly had his fair share of personal idiosyncrasies.
In a post for Medium, Adobe senior director Arno Gourdol adds one more to the list: that Jobs absolutely refused to carry an Apple ID with him.
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As one of the most recognizable guys in tech, of course everyone knows who Jobs was — but the refusal to carry an Apple ID badge came with its own problems. You see, ID badges at Apple are used to open automatic doors, with very, very few Apple employees having cards that can open every door in the company.
This means that Jobs, whose job called for him to constantly zip from department to department, was continually locked out of places he wanted to visit. As Gourdol notes:
“Steve has to be escorted everywhere on campus. He refuses to carry one of the access cards that would allow him to open the locked doors that separate the buildings. No one is really sure why, but there’s probably some logic to him for this eccentricity.”
I’ve heard similar stories from Apple employees myself. When I was writing my book The Apple Revolution, one Apple engineer told me that Steve would simply rap on any door he wanted opened, at which point people would run to let him in. “He was the only guy at Apple who could get away with that,” I was told. “He didn’t care. He thought the rules didn’t apply to him.”
To an extent, they really didn’t.
Source: Medium
